David Zinman’s Mahler cycle really hits its stride with this remarkable performance of the Third Symphony. It only has two small drawbacks worth mentioning. First, alto Birgit Remmert sounds pretty good in her big fourth-movement solo, but she’s far less impressive during her brief contributions to the choral fifth movement. Perhaps this take came from another evening (the symphony was recorded during a series of live performances). Second, at the very end of the symphony, despite the very beautiful playing, the trumpets fail to ring out as Mahler’s score directs. Better this glowing sonority than stridency, but there’s no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds (Haitink’s first recording with the Concertgebouw on Philips never has been surpassed in this respect).
Otherwise, this is pretty sensational. Zinman nails the first movement, from the creepy, gurgling sounds of the opening through a major-key march that has real brilliance and swing. There’s not a trace of underplaying or that awful “Mahler lite” quality that sometimes afflicts today’s performances (from Norrington to Abbado). The wild “mob” episode in the development section gives Bernstein (Sony) a very good run for his money, and the coda really rocks. The second movement offers particularly strong contrasts between slow and fast sections, making the music more dramatic than usual. In the scherzo Zinman takes the posthorn solos very slowly but varies the offstage perspective to create a fascinating interplay of texture between trumpet, horns, and strings. It’s really special, and the same movement’s coda never has been more colorfully shaped, with horns and trumpets tossing back their hunting fanfares in the spirit of the scherzo of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony.
As perviously noted, Remmert does well by her Nietzsche text in the fourth movement, less well in the fifth, but the latter features fine chorus-work and a vivid underpinning of bell sounds. Zinman’s tempo for the finale (almost exactly 23 minutes) strikes me as ideal, not too fast but never dragging. The Tonhalle strings play very eloquently here, and the soft brass chorale before the final triumphant climax is truly luminous. In sum, this is a performance with a distinctive but idiomatic point of view that gives great satisfaction. The sonics in SACD multichannel format are good, but I still find that traditional stereo has the greatest impact, as it so often does. Mahler’s Third is a tough work to hold together, but Zinman reveals himself here as a fearless Mahlerian who stands with the best.
