For the sake of completeness?

quote:

We must be very honest. This is not good Mahler...... but it just never works for me.

So spoke conductor Klaus Tennstedt in an interview with Edward Seckerson (published in the Gramophone in 1987 - when in was much finer than it is today - and for which I must thank another forum member for passing me a copy of). The interview focuses on the Tennstedt's Mahler and the comment above is in reference to the finale of the 7th. I completely disagree with him (I've heard it done so well), and indeed, none of the rest of the work makes much sense to me without it. Indeed, the seventh has a particularly strong sense of journey, the long journey through the night to which the finale is the dawn (and that makes it a firm favourite of mine, along with all the others....). Of course, it is a very hard movement to pull off (and many interpreters fail to make sense clearly of the competing themes), but such could be said of many Mahler movements.

With a cannon so vast as Mahler, it is perhaps hardly surprising if not everyone likes all of it (it took me far longer to fall in love with some works than it did others), I'd contrast this with Beethoven, where I would argue it's fairly hard to dislike any of the nine (if you like any of them to begin with). Clearly, from other comments in interview, Tennstedt loves other parts of the symphony, so perhaps that's reason enough to record it. More likely he did it because EMI wanted a complete cycle, completeness for the sake of it. Something I doubtless feed with my penchant for buying complete boxes of Mahler (though that's mainly on economic grounds - there are few I can think of without weak links).

But it does make me wonder that more conductors don't adopt the Giulini approach. In interviews (and there are a number of fine ones as fillers on various of his BBC Legends issues), he talks about how he would only perform a work which he loved, felt he understood and had something to say about. Something similar could doubtless be said of the reclusive Carlos Kleiber. So would a little more of this be no bad thing?


regards, Tam