Bruckner Symphony 3 & Mahler Symphony 2 – Adler

There is something almost perverse about listening to a 1956 Viennese radio tape of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor and coming away moved rather than merely instructed. Music & Arts has a habit of doing this to me. Just when I think I’ve heard every conceivable angle on the standard repertory, along comes some forgotten broadcast, rescued from a vault in Linz or Graz, and I’m reminded how much conducting history got lost simply because nobody thought to keep the tape running.

Charles Adler is the name attached here, and if it means little to most collectors, that’s an accident of geography and record-company politics rather than a judgment on his gifts. Viennese by training, itinerant by necessity — he spent long stretches in America, conducting where he could, championing composers nobody else would touch — Adler belonged to that generation of Central European musicians whose careers got scattered by the twentieth century’s larger catastrophes. He never quite landed in a podium chair prestigious enough to guarantee posterity’s attention. Mark Kluge’s booklet essay for this release, expanding on notes he wrote for the previously issued Adler traversal of the Mahler Third, fills in a good deal of this picture, and it is worth reading before, not after, you cue up disc one.

The performance itself unfolds at a tempo that will strike some listeners as extraordinarily unhurried — the first movement runs just short of twenty-four minutes, which places Adler among the most spacious Mahlerians on record, well past Klemperer’s already-broad conception and into territory usually associated with much later, more studied recordings. Does it work? Mostly. There is a case to be made that the Todtenfeier needs urgency, needs to feel like a funeral march barely containing its own rage, and there are stretches — particularly in the development — where Adler’s patience tips into inertia. But his sturdiness has its own rewards. He never chases a cheap climax. The architecture holds.

The Vienna Symphony of that era was not the Philharmonic, and the close-miked radio sound is unsparing about it: you hear smudged entrances in the brass, occasional intonation that wanders under pressure, a general roughness that no amount of remastering can sand away. Fair enough — in 1956 this score was still relatively unfamiliar terrain for orchestral musicians who hadn’t grown up, as later generations did, with Mahler as core repertory. Bernstein hadn’t yet made his crusade. What you hear, ragged edges and all, is an orchestra working out the music’s demands in something closer to real time, which has its own fascination even when it makes you wince.

The Andante moderato is where Adler’s temperament really pays off — unforced, warmly sprung, the Ländler rhythms treated with an affection that never curdles into sentimentality. The louder episode around the four-and-a-half-minute mark lands with real heft. The scherzo, too, is shrewdly paced, sardonic without overplaying its hand, and the brief nightmare glimpses of the finale-to-come register with genuine unease.

Sonja Dreksler’s “Urlicht” is the disc’s loveliest surprise — a firm, unforced alto, phrased with a kind of settled dignity that never begs for our tears and gets them anyway. Anny Felbermayer partners her well once the soprano enters in the finale, though the engineering does both singers few favors; balances in the last movement are erratic, brass sometimes swamping voices that should float above the texture, offstage instruments (handled, credit where due, with reasonable care) occasionally more present than they ought to be. Adler brings the movement home with dramatic conviction, if not quite the visceral charge later conductors — Bernstein most famously, Tennstedt in his own broadcast performances — would bring to the same pages.

Put beside the studio-bound alternatives of its era — the same conductor’s own Mahler Third, or Rodzinski’s wartime broadcasts, or the eventual Bernstein—Adler’s Second is not a first recommendation. It is, however, a fascinating document: an underrated maestro’s unhurried, deeply considered view of a symphony still finding its place in the repertory, captured by an orchestra playing slightly above its own comfort level and rising, more often than not, to the occasion. Collectors interested in Mahler reading history — real history, not the sanitized kind — should hear it.