Bruckner Symphony No. 3 and Mahler Resurrection – Adler

Some conductors treat Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony as a battlefield to be stormed. F. Charles Adler treats it more like a cathedral he’s been given the keys to and told to take his time locking up. That patience will not suit everybody. It suited me, mostly, though there were stretches — and I mean this kindly — where I found myself glancing at my watch, then feeling a little ashamed of myself for doing it.

Adler was one of those conductors history nearly lost track of. Austrian by birth, he’d assisted Mahler himself in Vienna as a young man, then scattered across three continents building festivals and orchestras nobody remembers now — Worcester, Massachusetts, of all places, got one of them. By the time he made this recording with the Vienna Symphony in 1956, he was an old man documenting a tradition that was already beginning to calcify into legend. Every bar carries that unhurried authority: the sound of someone who doesn’t need to prove he knew Mahler, because he actually did.

The first movement runs nearly twenty-four minutes, and yes, that is on the outer edge of anything you’re likely to encounter — Klemperer’s studio account with the Philharmonia is broad, Horenstein broader still, but Adler asks you to sit inside the Totenfeier for what feels like a genuine funeral rite rather than a dramatic curtain-raiser. The tread is heavy, almost geological. There’s a cost. Momentum sags in places, particularly through the development, and the Vienna Symphony — a fine orchestra, but not then in the league of its Philharmonic cousin across town — betrays some scrappy ensemble work in the massed string writing. The engineering sits close, unforgivingly close, and every smudged entrance in the horns registers. But there’s conviction here that no amount of technical polish could manufacture, and conviction counts for something in this music.

The Ländler of the second movement is where Adler’s instincts really pay off. He lets the strings breathe into their portamento, unfashionable as that already was by 1956, and there’s a gentle Viennese lilt — a little sway in the hips, so to speak — that younger, faster conductors often iron out entirely. The turbulent middle section, around the four-and-a-half-minute mark, erupts with real weight rather than mere volume. The scherzo that follows has characterful woodwind pointing and a sardonic edge that anticipates the finale’s crisis nicely; Adler clearly understood this movement as more than connective tissue.

Sonja Dreksler’s “Urlicht” is the emotional center of gravity for the whole performance — a firm, unforced alto voice, sung with a kind of grave simplicity that never tips into sentimentality. She doesn’t oversell the words. She trusts Mahler, and Mahler rewards her.

The finale is where I have reservations, though modest ones. Adler manages the offstage brass and percussion — that eerie summons from beyond the stage, so difficult to balance in any hall, let alone a studio recording of that vintage — with more skill than I expected. But the great structural climb toward the choral entrance, “Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du,” wants a sense of inexorability that here feels merely long. Compare Bernstein’s 1970s account with the LSO, or even his earlier New York traversal — the sheer terror and ecstasy Bernstein wrings from the same pages makes Adler’s reading feel almost reticent by comparison. Anny Felbermayer’s soprano floats nicely above the choir, and the Austrian Radio Choir sings with more sincerity than sheen, entering the great chorale with hushed, almost frightened tenderness rather than triumphant swell.

Should this displace your Klemperer, your Bernstein, your Rattle? No — and nobody at Music & Arts would claim otherwise. But as a historical document, a glimpse of how this symphony sounded filtered through a player who had breathed the same Viennese air as its composer, it has real value. Imperfect, unhurried, occasionally exasperating — and honest in a way that feels increasingly rare.