Pierre Boulez’s ongoing Mahler cycle has been the source of both amazement and consternation. That this ultra-modernist composer could take on these ultra-romantic works and play them with such sensitivity to the music’s inherent drama (as in the First and Sixth symphonies) is in itself surprising. Boulez’s more customary detachment at times seems to work against the music, as in the strangely cool reading of the Seventh Symphony’s first movement. So now we come to Das Lied von der Erde, a work that most explicitly expresses Mahler’s world weariness and longing for vanished youth.
Well, Boulez certainly seems weary here, but from this faceless, emotionally neutered reading you can’t tell that he ever had any idea what youthful passions are about. This performance is a non-starter from the first, with Mahler’s swaggering, seafaring horn calls going for nothing under Boulez’s matter-of-fact-treatment, a fact underscored by Michael Schade’s bold and bright-toned singing (though he wimps-out a little in “The Drunken man in Spring”). The orchestra never rises above mezzo-forte, and virtually all accents are smoothed over (the Vienna Philharmonic was more involved for Bernstein in his 1967 recording). Boulez does illuminate many details, however, and the quiet orchestral interlude is a miracle of balance and shading. In fact, the movement as whole sounds more like Debussy’s Rhondes de Printemps than Mahler.
This same disengagement all but spoils the fourth movement, “Of Youth”, who’s central episode is so devoid of excitement that you almost imagine those young knights dashing off on hobby horses. Once again, the singing stands apart from the presentation: Violetta Urmana’s rich, warm tone lovingly caresses the music and draws forth the deep feelings inhabiting Mahler’s text. Urmana’s penetrating performance nearly rescues Der Abschied as she inspires Boulez to some degree of warmth with her rapturous intonations of the movement’s more transcendent passages.
But once he’s on his own, Boulez returns to his miserly self, dispatching the movement’s great central episode with unaccustomed speed, and not a trace of the heartbreak it usually evokes. For that you must turn to recordings by Haitink, Klemperer, Bernstein, and Bertini, among others. In fact any of these will give you a truer experience of this poignant work than Boulez. (DG hasn’t had much luck with Das Lied’s, a fact that makes its decision to keep it’s excellent Sinopoli version out of the U.S. especially frustrating.)
