Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D Major (Live)

Album review

In an important moment, the great interpreter of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies for Eternal Records (the ethereal symphonies nos. 4 and 7 in Dresden during the seventies, the subtle Symphony No. 6 in San Francisco with Decca, all those with Gewandhaus during his years with Querstand), Herbert Blomstedt returns to head the Bamberger Symphoniker with a 9th by Mahler. But there seems to be something up here. Blomstedt seems to have concentrated his efforts on all that is intrinsically ‘new’ in Mahler’s sonic universe. Blomstedt has stripped back the instrumentals, accusing some of being “ugly” or out of place. He has put emphasis on the harshness of the writing and the explosive character of the changes between string, brass and woodwind parts (Im Tempo eines gemàchlichen Ländlers); even the lyricism has gone under the knife (the central episode of Rono-Burleske). What’s going on? Where are we being taken? We are clearly at the conception of a completely new world here in which the tempos carry a feeling of moderation throughout the symphony and allow one to live, intensely, in the moment: the end of Rondo-Burleske acts as an initial cataclysm. The symphony could have come to an end here but it is followed by the enormous 20-minute-long Adagio postlude in which one asks if it could possibly get more sad or morbid. The colors dull, the tones themselves inexorably fade and the polyphonic layers die down. Emotions fly. With this 9th, recorded in June 2018 in the Joseph-Keilberth-Saal of the Bamberg Konzerthalle, Herbert Blomstedt returns to deliver true Mahler: the abstract. Love is mystical, cosmic and human. It is without hope. Bruckner’s 19th Century is blown away. Fascinating. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/Qobuz