Twenty years have elapsed since Claudio Abbado’s first Mahler Third appeared, a recording lauded (largely by the British press) chiefly for the (not very compelling) participation of the Vienna Philharmonic. Abbado has since partially trimmed his rather expansive view of the symphony, and more importantly, he’s assumed leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic, surely a factor in DG’s decision to give him another crack at the piece. But considering that this performance in no way improves on the previous one (and in many respects is a reversal), and that DG in the meantime recorded a magnificent version of this symphony with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (who beat the Berliners like Lennox Lewis beat Mike Tyson), you have to wonder if there was a real need for a new Abbado Mahler Third.
To take Bernstein as a comparison, you can tell a great deal about the character of each conductor’s performance right from the symphony’s opening horn call: Bernstein’s is bold, brazen, and sharply articulated, while Abbado’s rounded sonorities sound more like a gentle reminder than an urgent summons. It doesn’t help that the recording, taken from a live BBC broadcast concert, is anemically low-level, requiring you to crank up the volume past the 50 percent mark to get any presence and sense of depth. But even with this remedy there are the bizarrely askew balances to contend with, possibly due to the acoustics of Royal Albert Hall. So, along with bass drum rolls that rattle your living room we get trumpet fanfares that barely register.
Then again, much of the blame here must be laid at Abbado’s feet, as he continues the obsession with pianissimos that he displayed in the early 1980s. Must the woodwind triplets that accent the strings’ marching theme (first movement) be all but inaudible? And what about the crucial snare drum in the movement’s swirling climax? Or the cymbals near the end of the scherzo? It’s performance characteristics such as these that lead me to conclude that Abbado doesn’t have a real sense of how this symphony should sound. Instead of snarling trombones and sneering trumpets (Bernstein’s sinister triplet motif sounds with a delicious moustache-twirling villainy) we get muted dynamics and matter-of-fact phrasing. This is music that should startle and stun; instead Abbado makes it sound boring.
There are exceptions, as in the fourth movement, wonderfully sung by Anna Larsson, where Abbado compels his players to execute Mahler’s rarely heard portamentos. And in tightening his conception of the concluding Adagio, Abbado shaves five minutes off his previous timing while giving his rendition much needed shape and flow (though not the rapt intensity of Bernstein). You could argue that it’s a bit disingenuous to compare Abbado so closely to Bernstein, as they are two very different personalities. But we can just as easily turn to Gielen, Salonen, Levine, or Neumann to hear performances that better capture the strange and magical spirit of this music. Is this a bad performance? Not at all. Is it a very good one? No, it’s not that either. It’s an opportunity for Berlin Philharmonic fans to hear their orchestra play Mahler’s Third, and it’s another chance for Abbado loyalists to experience his particular way with the work, a way that leaves the great interpretations comfortably unchallenged.
