Mahler Symphony No. 8 – Jansons

Nobody who has ever tried to herd a thousand musicians through Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in E flat major comes away unscathed — the “Symphony of a Thousand” is a title the composer never sanctioned but one that promoters seized on, and for once the hype undersells the logistics. Two enormous choruses, a children’s choir, eight vocal soloists, an orchestra bloated with extra brass. The piece is a monument to Mahler’s unfashionable faith, in 1906, that the symphony could still contain the whole of creation. Mariss Jansons, in this Concertgebouw performance, doesn’t so much tame the monster as persuade it to breathe.

That’s the real achievement here. So many performances of the Eighth turn into an exercise in sheer tonnage — conductors seem to think the only interpretive decision left is how loud. Jansons understands that the “Veni, creator spiritus” of Part I needs structural backbone, phrases shaped with the same care Mahler lavished on a Rückert song. He gets it. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s lower strings dig in at the opening with real weight, not just volume, and the great double fugue arrives having been prepared rather than merely survived.

The choral work is the thing I keep coming back to. Three choirs — Bavarian Radio, Netherlands Radio, the State Choir “Latvija” — fused into one instrument. You would never guess the component parts came from three different countries and training traditions. Diction is astonishingly unified in the Latin; the sopranos open up at climaxes with a gleam that never curdles into shriek. The National Children’s Choir, memorized, unfazed, somehow audible as individual human beings even inside a wall of sound, gives Part II’s “Chorus mysticus” a vulnerability that the adult massed voices, for all their splendor, can’t supply alone.

Among the soloists, Christine Brewer’s Magna peccatrix rides the ensemble with a creamy, unforced power that recalls how good she was in this repertoire a decade ago in St. Louis and elsewhere. The voice simply sails. Stephanie Blythe’s contralto has the dark, cello-like richness this music wants; you believe her as the Samaritan woman at the well, penitent and large-souled at once. Robert Dean Smith’s Doctor Marianus is the more complicated case: a lighter, more lyric instrument than some of the heldentenors who’ve taken this role (think of the sheer force Ben Heppner once brought to it), but Smith compensates with intelligent, unforced phrasing, and in Part II’s mystical ascent that approach pays dividends. Stefan Kocán’s Pater profundus has the requisite granite in the voice, if not always ideal legato.

Sonically, the engineers have done something not every Mahler Eighth on disc manages: they’ve let the quiet pages register. The hushed introduction to Part II is murky, searching, full of half-lit instrumental color, and it comes through with real transparency, strings and harp and celesta all audible in their separate planes. Then the big tuttis hit without distortion, without that boxy congestion so many large-venue recordings of this symphony suffer from. Credit the Concertgebouw’s hall. Credit also whoever balanced this thing.

Does it unseat Bernstein’s visionary, white-hot 1966 account, or Solti’s granitic Chicago version, or Rattle’s more recent, theatrically staged reading? Not entirely. Those remain, in their different ways, indispensable documents of the work’s extremity. But Jansons offers something rarer: coherence. He makes the Eighth sound like a symphony and not just an event.

Very highly recommended — and worth having on disc even if, like me, you never quite get around to hooking up the accompanying video.