Right away, let me bring to your attention the one factor that will make this recording undesirable for many listeners: Scherchen’s drastic abbreviation of the scherzo with two massive cuts that leave only about one third of the movement intact (shortening it from a normal 16 minutes to slightly more than five). Harmonia Mundi makes no mention of this and does not list individual movement timings on the CD cover (although the overall timing of 53:27 should cause concern). Now, for those listeners who aren’t bothered by such things as textual completeness, there’s the sound to contend with. Basically its very recessed, almost as if the orchestra were in another room–except for the cymbal, which is annoyingly close-miked.
Beyond that, the performance is actually quite interesting, in a perverse sort of way. Scherchen indulges in extremes of tempo, preferring to crawl for the slow sections and manically speed up for the fast ones. Thus, the funeral march first movement has the fastest development section ever, and the following allegro movement floors it and brakes like a New York City cab driver. (And dig those crazy late cymbal crashes, three in a row!) After the aforementioned amputated scherzo, Scherchen subjects us to a slowly melting adagio that at 13 minutes stretches the music’s melodic structure almost to the breaking point. And in the finale, besides returning to his headlong rush, Scherchen shortchanges the coda with yet another unnecessary cut. If after all of this you’re still interested, then you’re a committed Scherchen fan, and more power to you. Everybody else can choose from the great Mahler Fifth’s by Bernstein, Kubelik, Chailly, Barbirolli, Sinopoli, and Karajan, to name only a few.
