Mahler - Symphony No. 7 (LSO/Gergiev) [Hybrid SACD]

After listening to Gergiev's earlier installments of his ongoing Mahler cycle, I had some negative trepidations. I was to be pleasantly surprised. I had found his earlier Mahler 6th to be undernourished and distantly recorded. The sound stage for this recording is still recessed from the listeners perspective, but a little tweaking of the volume control revealed a wonderfully detailed, fresh and spaciously clear stereo image. His somewhat ascerbic view of the score, for me, works very fine for this symphony. The only complaint that I would have is the in-your- face prominence of the cymbols! Minor indeed. So I greatly enjoyed this release.
Other recordings that I would recommend for the thoughtful listeners enjoyment is any of Abaddo's renditions, (of course) Bernstein's, and Geilen. For the historically inclined, I suppose Scherchen or Horenstein.

I was surprised by the quality of Gergiev's reading of Mahler's strange and wonderful Seventh. I haven't cared for my earlier samplings of his cycle - finding the First a pretty crude affair (not helped by a so-so recording) and the Sixth a perfunctory run through not at all redeemed by a mediocre SACD encoding.

The Seventh is something else again. The bass prominent sonics of the first movement are atmospheric and the "dragging" quality of the opening appropriate to the context. The C major theme - a wonderful moment in Mahler's work - is well played. The coda is speedy and well integrated into the whole.

The first "Nachtmusik" is well done. The march episodes are alert and the bizarre quasi-tango bits come across very well. The cowbells are neither overly prominent nor sounding like they were recorded in another hall.

The Scherzo is less spooky than I've heard it elsewhere, but the quick tempo works well and it comes across as tongue in cheek. I couldn't help think of Snoopy's parodies of Bulwar-Lytton's stock "It was a dark and stormy night." This is a refreshing approach.

The finale opens with a rousing fanfare and proceeds at a good clip. This movement has always struck me as deliberately superficial (for example the repetition of the "Merry Widow" like tune) or parody. Gergiev plays it for it's off kilter humor and the orchestra responds well.

I listened in the SACD surround mode. The recording is close up with only a minimal sense of the hall - which I prefer to being unrealistically plunked down into the middle of the orchestra. As a whole, the production isn't a touchstone for DSD encoding. Upper strings in particular lack the bloom of the best examples of this technology.

It is refreshing to enjoy this installment of Gergiev's cycle when I've been very disappointed in examples I've heard. I will have to give his new Eighth a listen.

When Mahler was rehearsing his 7th symphony for its premiere performance in Prague, he immediately jumped to the finale when his wife, the lovely Alma Schindler, finally caught up to him and entered the hall. He also referred to the finale as a stroke of sunshine in C-Major. Yet, it's often times the finale that comes off as anti-climatic in commercial recordings. No such problems here. Gergiev is the first one to truly challenge Kiril Kondrashin - another fellow Russian, but a blast from the past - in making this one of the most exciting, most exhilarating finales ever. He clocks in at well less than 17 minutes, yet there are plenty of deep bells and cow bells in the movement's final peroration. Just a bit more stretching of tempo in the final few bars would have made all this even more effective. Since this is a basically a Rondo movement (actually, it veers away from a true Rondo as it goes along), the one variation with simultaneous bass drum and cymbal strokes is particularly outstanding here (it's a little more than half-way through).

As is becoming more standard practice now, the second Nachtmusik (4th movement) is taken a bit on a swift side; more Italian serenade-like, than a sleepy or dreamy nocturnal romance. The middle movement scherzo is very well pegged: not too slow, but not excessive fast either - just as Mahler warns against. It's the first Nachtmusik (2nd movement) that's a bit of let-down here: it's simply too fast and lacks any sense of atmosphere. It's a throw-away.

As for the long first movement, it gets off to a rough and slipshod start. But things improve greatly during the contrasting, "moonlit" central episode, and Gergiev milks every ounce of bizarreness that he can muster out of the first movement's final few moments. Cymbal crashes are huge; the horns are loud; the "teletype" rhythm in the horns and snare drum just comes off as being strange and surreal, and the two-bar funeral dirge passage just seems like the last straw - until we find ourselves in the midst of the even more bizarre, more surreal final few measures of the movement.

It seems as though Mahler could see everything that was going to happen on the European battlefields between 1914 and 1918. So it seems. Then there's the finale - a parody of himself, and of the late romantic idiom in general; poking fun at the age of Zeppelins and Titanics. Am I sounding like Gergiev yet?