Yoel Levi has built an extraordinary instrument during his tenure in Atlanta. The playing on this new Mahler Symphony No. 1 is outstanding, and you get the original second movement (“Blumine”, or “Flowers”) in its proper place. Personally, I believe that Mahler was correct in cutting this movement out, but it’s nice to listen to it every so often. Levi’s performance has its impressive moments. The opening is absolutely magical, offstage trumpets very distant, the transition to the allegro proper excellently managed. Note especially the perfectly balanced bass clarinet counterpoint to the cello’s main theme, and the way the music builds steadily to its concluding climax. Levi’s control here is absolute. The scherzo has vigor, with delicious string portamento tastefully applied in the trio, while the Jewish music in the third (now fourth) movement funeral march has an idiomatic swing.
The finale, though, lets the performance down. Despite scrupulous observance of the letter of the score and the rich recorded sound, the fast sections simply lack the violence and passion that the music demands, and in the coda, Levi opts for stateliness where Mahler requires a jolt of adrenaline. As sometimes happened with George Szell in his Cleveland heyday, total podium control and note-perfect accuracy seem an end in itself at the expense of emotional expression. It’s an understandable fault given the high-quality orchestral response elsewhere, but this finale has to sound like the performers have let themselves go; it needs an “over the top” quality to sweep the listener forward through its episodic structure. Levi holds the reigns too tightly, and the result, good though it may be from a technical point of view, hardly matches what Bernstein (DG), Kubelik (DG), Solti/LSO (Decca), or the recent Boulez (DG) achieve in this same music. Levi is very good, then, but not quite great, and in this symphony there’s a lot of recorded greatness to contend with.
