It may sound like a broken record (remember those?) to keep saying that there was a time when any new recording of a Mahler symphony was a special event, but aside from this observation being true, I am not expressing nostalgia for “the good old days”. Indeed, it’s wonderful that music lovers have so many options in so much basic and not-so-basic repertoire, at such low prices. It was Haitink himself who, in an interview about a decade ago, said that Bruckner and Mahler were played and recorded too often, but no one has paid less attention to his own words than he. This is his sixth recording of this symphony (including videos), his fourth with the Concertgebouw alone, and we are perfectly justified in asking just how many different or meaningful insights the same guy with the same orchestra can bring to the same piece of music.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is “not many”. That doesn’t mean that this is a bad performance; it’s very good in the latter three movements. The first movement, unfortunately, is stiff in tempo from the start of the development section onward, and it gets duller as it goes despite the excellent playing. You can always count on the Concertgebouw winds (and solo horn) to characterize the scherzo well, and the adagio, serene but flowing, is the undoubted highpoint of this performance. Haitink’s success in those short, accelerating variations just before the big climax makes his comparative unresponsiveness in the opening movement all the more puzzling.
Christine Schäfer sings her solo in the finale very nicely, if without quite the purity of timbre the music ideally requires (Reri Grist for Bernstein on Sony remains the reference here). But all things considered, if you already own one of Haitink’s previous recordings of this symphony, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to buy this one. And if you don’t have one of those previous releases, this performance isn’t special enough to warrant your attention. It’s a competent, well-engineered effort by an orchestra steeped in the idiom and by an over-recorded but musically sincere conductor. And that’s all that can be said for it.
