Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Das Lied von der Erde looks potentially promising on paper but fails to live up to its expectations. That’s too bad, because Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic already have given us excellent recordings of Mahler’s Third and Fourth Symphonies. It’s difficult to put a finger what goes wrong in this performance, for it’s truly satisfactory in any technical sense. However, much of the problem seems to be with the singers themselves. Placido Domingo plows his way through the strenuous first song better than most, but what language is he singing in? His constant reliance on using vowels and avoiding consonants can easily get on your nerves. Bo Skovhus is a beautiful, creamy sounding baritone, but his singing also lacks the requisite coloring of the text. With Skovhus, it’s as though every word and every thought behind the text were exactly the same. Salonen chooses sensible tempos throughout the work, but “Der Abschied’s” central funeral march is a bit hasty here, and thus Salonen fails to plumb the depths of despair as he should. Mahler’s ecstatic release into the ether at the end of “Der Abschied” is exquisitely handled, but it goes for naught since so little seems to have happened along the way.
In addition, Sony Classical’s digital sonics are a bit studio bound, with the two singers not all that well integrated into the general acoustic. If you’re looking for a Das Lied von der Erde that uses a baritone in lieu of a mezzo-soprano, stick with the 1966 Bernstein/Vienna Philharmonic recording on Decca Legends, or the 1959 Paul Kletzki performance on EMI. Both recordings use the incomparable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the low voice role. If the ultimate in modern sonics is your goal regardless of gender choice, then you couldn’t possibly do better than the recent Reference Recordings issue with Eiji Oue leading the Minnesota Orchestra. In that recording, Michelle DeYoung gives us the finest mezzo performance since Janet Baker.
