Mahler Symphonies – Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Some orchestras own a composer the way certain actors own a Shakespeare role — you hear one and think inevitably of the other. The Concertgebouw’s claim on Mahler goes back to Mengelberg, who badgered the composer into visiting Amsterdam and then spent the rest of his career, and much of the next generation’s, keeping the flame lit under sometimes disreputable circumstances. Purge the man’s politics from the story if you can (you can’t, quite), and what remains is a sound — burnished, dark-grained in the low strings, brass that blooms rather than blares — that Haitink inherited and refined across nearly three decades on the podium, and that Chailly inflected with a cooler, more analytical ear. This new package, all ten symphonies plus Totenfeier and Das Lied von der Erde spread across a small army of conductors, arrives with the marketing sheen RCO Live has made its house style: sleek typography, high-resolution surround sound, that slightly self-congratulatory booklet design. Whether the music inside justifies the packaging is, as always, a separate question.

Jansons gets the crowd-pleasers — Second, Third, Eighth — and I confess to lingering doubts. He’s a scrupulous, intelligent conductor, but scrupulousness is not always what the Resurrection wants. There’s a wildness in Mahler, a willingness to let the material overreach and even embarrass itself, that Jansons tends to sand down. His Oslo Second on Chandos had genuine electricity; this Concertgebouw remake feels more upholstered, gorgeous in the pianissimos — that hushed offstage brass in the finale genuinely floats — but short of the final degree of terror in the “Urlicht” transition. Compare Bernstein’s old New York account, or even Klemperer’s granite-hewn version, and Jansons can seem almost too well-mannered a host.

The wisdom of farming out the rest of the cycle becomes apparent fast. Bernard Haitink’s presence — he gets, I believe, one of the middle symphonies here in a late-career return engagement — carries the authority of six decades’ accumulated familiarity. You sense an orchestra playing not for a guest but for family. Eliahu Inbal, whose Frankfurt cycle for Denon in the 1980s did serious work rehabilitating the performing traditions of the earlier symphonies, brings scholarly rigor without dryness. Boulez’s contribution — unmistakably his, all clarified textures and unsentimental tempi — will delight listeners who prize structural transparency over interpretive indulgence, and infuriate those who want their Mahler drenched in Viennese schmaltz. I lean toward delight, mostly, though there are stretches where I miss the last ounce of vulgarity Mahler surely intended.

Daniel Harding’s Tenth, in the Cooke performing edition presumably, deserves the praise it’s already collected elsewhere. He’s young enough, relatively, that his grip on this valedictory, unfinished score might have seemed presumptuous a decade ago. It doesn’t now. The Adagio unfolds with an unhurried inevitability, and the great dissonant climax — that shattering chord with the trumpet howling above it — hits with real physical force, the Concertgebouw brass unflinching at the top of their register.

Daniele Gatti’s name attached to the Fifth raised my expectations, given his well-regarded Conifer release, and mostly they’re met: the famous Adagietto avoids the treacly slowness some conductors mistake for profundity, moving instead with a kind of held breath, string tone glowing without wallowing. Lorin Maazel, never a maestro I warmed to reflexively, turns in a reading — I think the Sixth, or possibly Seventh — of surprising discipline; his literalism, often a liability elsewhere, suits Mahler’s more astringent, marching passages rather well.

Fabio Luisi is the wild card, known to most of us chiefly for an unfinished Strauss project on Sony, and he gets two assignments: Totenfeier, that extraordinary symphonic poem Mahler later absorbed wholesale into the opening movement of the Second, and Das Lied von der Erde. The former is a genuine find — hearing it as the freestanding, unresolved tone poem it originally was throws new light on the symphony it became, all that funereal unrest without the eventual consolation. The Lied, though, is more mixed; his soloists (unnamed here, but presumably drawn from the label’s regular stable) don’t quite match the visionary desolation Klemperer drew from Christa Ludwig, or the sheer vocal glamour Bernstein got from James King and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Competent, well-shaped, a little earthbound.

Does the scattershot approach cohere? Surprisingly, yes — more than a single conductor’s traversal might, if that conductor happened to have an off week with the Fourth or an unpersuasive view of the Ninth. The orchestra is the unifying voice, and it’s a voice that’s been marinating in this repertoire since before most record labels existed. As the only complete Mahler cycle currently available on Blu-ray — Abbado’s Lucerne performances remain split awkwardly between two labels, and were dogged by technical glitches in their initial release — this box claims a functional monopoly as well as an artistic one.

Recommended, with the usual caveats that attend any multi-conductor cycle.