A finely balanced recording places the voices in ideal relationship with the orchestra which itself is given a well-aired, clean sound (although the Amsterdam sound of 13 years ago for Bernstein is no less truthful). It supports a performance that is predictably – given the BPO/Abbado partnership – shipshape in execution, nothing in Mahler’s highly original scoring overlooked. As is customary with this conductor’s Mahler, the approach tends to be objective and disciplined. In that respect it is at the opposite pole to the concept of Bernstein who, in my favourite version among many available, is more yielding and, to my ears, more idiomatically Mahlerian in mood and in subtlety of rubato, those little lingerings that mean so much in interpreting the composer – yet Bernstein is no slower as a whole.
Quasthoff comes very near the top of baritones who have essayed the military songs, his tone compact, well-ordered, responsive to verbal nuance, and he’s as successful with the lighter and ever-delightful ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’, nightingale, cuckoo and donkey nicely characterized. Yet Andreas Schmidt, for Bernstein, benefiting from his slightly lighter, slimmer voice, is marginally preferable to Quasthoff in flexibility and varied tone. Von Otter, her intelligent self throughout, is a little too knowing in her approach to the comic songs assigned to her; by contrast she brings a Wagnerian intensity to that mini-tragedy ‘Das irdische Leben’. Her tone sometimes loses colour, but not in ‘Wo die schonen Trompeten’, where her acuity with the text and feeling for the evocation of the distanced trumpets is second only to Popp’s on the Bernstein. Popp is as moving, if not more so, in this song, with some pianissimo singing von Otter cannot match, and unequalled in her easier traversal of the lighter songs.
Where two characters are involved, Abbado opts for a single voice, Bernstein for two. Although Abbado may be following what Mahler wanted, ‘Trost im Ungluck’ and the delicious ‘Verlor’ne Muh’, for instance, are so much more pointed with the combined voices of Popp and Schmidt. So DG hasn’t quite managed to trump its own ace. '