Carlos Païta was never quite a household name, even in the years when Decca’s Phase Four series briefly made him visible to listeners hunting for spectacle in their hi-fi demonstrations. Born in Buenos Aires, trained in Europe, conducting with a flamboyance that sometimes outran his baton craft — he was the sort of figure the record industry occasionally conjures and then quietly forgets. These recordings from the late 1970s and early ‘80s, made at Kingsway Hall and later salvaged by the German audiophile label Lodia before finding their current home, represent his legacy on disc. It is, I’m sorry to report, a mixed one at best and a damaging one at worst.
The “Siegfried‘s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung opens with a wind chord that arrives slightly smeared — not catastrophically, but enough to put you on notice. What follows has moments of genuine beauty. The cellos are dark and vibrant in exactly the way you want them, the clarinet solo is handled with real sensitivity and restraint, and for a few minutes you think: maybe this will come together. It doesn’t. As the orchestral texture thickens and the music demands cumulative momentum — Wagner building his great arches of sound the way a cathedral builder thinks in decades, not afternoons — Païta loses the thread. He hustles the climactic tutti rather than allowing it to crest on its own enormous weight, and the balances go peculiar. The Funeral March fares no better; the sonics, which are basically fine, never find room to expand at the moments that most need space and darkness and finality.
But the Mahler. Oh, the Mahler.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 is a work that practically dares conductors to overinterpret it. The composer himself couldn’t leave it alone — he revised it obsessively between its 1889 Budapest premiere and the version we now perform, even briefly adding a whole movement, the “Blumine” Andante, before thinking better of it. The symphony wears its heart dangerously close to the surface, which means a conductor with an itch to tinker has unlimited opportunity to do harm. Païta, it turns out, has quite an itch.
The atmospheric opening — those sustained string harmonics, that barely-there A repeated seven octaves across the orchestra like a held breath — goes reasonably well. The woodwind entry almost dissolves into the harmonic haze, which is exactly the right effect. Then the main theme arrives, and something goes wrong immediately: the tempo jerks forward in a way that feels arbitrary rather than inevitable, slightly muddied by internal adjustments in the inner voices. Mahler marks the passage Immer sehr gemächlich — always very leisurely — and there’s nothing leisurely about this. When the exposition repeats, you live through the same displacement twice.
The development droops, then suddenly the horn fanfare races ahead with an urgency disconnected from anything preceding it. And things keep racing. There is a difference between the kind of tempo flexibility that illuminates a phrase — the rubato that Walter brought to this music, or that Barbirolli found in the slow movement of the Ninth, where each breath seems to come from somewhere very deep — and the kind that merely signals a director’s restlessness. Päita’s adjustments fall relentlessly into the second category.
The Ländler movement is the most instructive disaster. The opening pages go well enough; the Trio does not. Tempo adjustments pile up between phrases and within them, small nudges that accumulate into incoherence. A Ländler — an Austrian peasant dance, the direct ancestor of the waltz — needs a pulse you can feel in your feet even when the conductor bends the surface rhythm. Without that underlying regularity, Mahler’s folk-inflected nostalgia turns into something merely eccentric.
Think of Bernstein’s first recording of this symphony for Sony — a rendition that already pushes tempos to their outer limits, already takes risks that not everyone found persuasive. Now imagine those tendencies amplified several times over, stripped of the self-awareness and musical intelligence that kept Bernstein’s excesses at least arguable. That’s roughly where we are.
The final two movements impose some discipline on Päita’s worst impulses, which tells you something — that when the music itself provides a strong enough rhythmic framework, he can follow it. But by then the damage is done, and the goodwill has long since evaporated.
For these works there is simply no shortage of better options. Kubelik’s 1979 live disc with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Solti’s Chicago traversal, even Mehta’s early Los Angeles version — all of them reward repeated listening in ways this one does not. As Wagner goes, virtually any competent Bayreuth-trained hand will serve you better than what’s on offer here. Lodia’s audiophile ambitions and Kingsway Hall’s warm acoustics cannot compensate for the interpretive confusion at the center of this enterprise.
A curiosity, then. Not a recommendation.
