Jonathan Nott’s Mahler has received a great deal of praise in some quarters, much of it wholly undeserved. Part of this may be due to the general debasement of critical writing that has accompanied the demise of professional classical music magazines, along with the attendant rise of amateur bloggers and younger writers less familiar with the work’s discography and blissfully unconcerned with the need to uphold basic critical standards. This version of the Second offers a case in point: it’s not terrible, and any subscription concert attendee might well have been pleased at a nice evening out, but it has no business being preserved for posterity in rather distant SACD multichannel sound (that nevertheless captures the climaxes very well).
Indeed, this is a performance of “climaxes”. Nott generally hits the loud bits most impressively, aided in no small degree by some particularly present timpani, and this no doubt accounts for some of the excessive enthusiasm that has greeted the performance. The big eruptions in the finale, the work’s closing pages, and the cataclysmic lead-in to the first-movement recapitulation all go splendidly. It’s what happens in between that disappoints.
The very opening, somewhat rushed and lacking strength in the cellos and basses, sets the tone. Consider the passage at Figure 11 in the first movement: the return to Tempo 1 is heavy, flat-footed, and certainly not the original tempo that Nott establishes. The approach to the climax fails to build as it should, and when the big moment arrives and Mahler writes “Forward”, Nott holds back. He then interprets Mahler’s “somewhat hurried” directive as “rushing”, while the harp’s melodic counterpoint to the main melody in the flute gets lost in the texture. And so it goes. Great Mahler playing and conducting this is not.
The middle movements are simply bland. Treating the second movement as a sort of dazed reaction to the first has a long history behind it (Bernstein, for example), but its principal melody needs a greater wealth of accent and inflection than it receives here. The scherzo has some nice touches from the winds, but not quite enough colorful detail. Here the relatively distant sonics may play their part in robbing the music of some of the necessary character. In “Urlicht” alto Lioba Braun has a quick vibrato that some may find unappealing, and as I already mentioned, the finale goes well whenever the music gets loud, which happily is much of the time. So this isn’t terrible, but don’t be fooled by that “Mahler flavor of the month” hype we’ve seen so much of lately: there are many, many performances already available that are much better.
