Michael Gielen has a solid reputation as a conductor of Bruckner and Mahler, and this new Resurrection Symphony upholds it handsomely. His reading of Symphony No. 2 is not of the transcendent, epiphanic type espoused by the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Klaus Tennstedt, but more along the lines of the direct, flesh-and-blood manner represented by Otto Klemperer and Vaclav Neumann. Thus, Gielen’s first movement gets moving right away, not waiting to brood over the implications of the gruff string opening. However, he is a little too straightforward in the big turning-screw climax, where Bernstein (with the New York Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon) literally has you on the edge of your seat. Happily, Gielen holds nothing back in the scherzo’s climax, after which we hear Cornelia Kallisch’s beautifully plaintive singing in Urlicht.
The wide ranging, well balanced recording easily captures both the SWF Symphony’s mighty outburst that begins the long finale and the thrilling off-stage effects. A little less thrilling is Gielen’s moderately paced big march that, like Klemperer’s, offers nobility at the expense of some of the music’s accumulating frenzy; but it’s a valid interpretive option nevertheless. The Europa Chorus Academy’s clear and resonant singing adds tremendously to the mighty closing sequence, where it seems to float above all the brass, strings (here soaring sweetly), and percussion (which is well balanced and wonderfully performed throughout).
It’s quite disconcerting to move from Mahler’s heavenly tonality to the acrid dissonance of György Kurtág’s 1994 Stele (the title refers to the carved stone memorial tablets of ancient Greece). Composed in memory of Kurtág’s friend and mentor András Mihály, Stele begins with sharp contours and abrasive edges, but ends in an eerily resigned mood colored by fascinating contrasts in orchestral texture. Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre (1938) is full of surprises, not least of which are its mostly tonal harmonies and its use of an English text in the prayer for the Jewish Day of Atonement. James Johnson makes an alternately dramatic and solemn Rabbi in this fascinating work. This is an unusual yet thought-provoking coupling, and with its uniformly magnificent orchestral playing should become a serious contender for shelf space in any collection.
