Solti made his first recording of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (Decca 7BB178, 11/75) with the Concertgebouw Orchestra had made a legendary live recording of the work under one of the greatest of all exponents of Mahler's music, Willem Mengelberg. (The Mengelberg is newly available from specialist dealers in an excellent LP pressing on a mono Japanese Philips LP—PC-5553.) Nowadays, Mengelberg's performance sounds immensely daring; daring in its unabashed control of every germinal strand of the music, daring in the wide tempo variations, many of them in the score, others there by implication; daring in the use of rubato and in the unusually refined use of string portamento. No modern recording, not even Karajan's (DG) or Abbado's (also DG), has violin playing with the superfine silken sheen of the Concertgebouw players on the 1939 recording though it should be said that the cello section of Solti's Chicago Symphony plays on this latest recording with a homogeneity of tone and sensitivity of dynamic nuance which orchestral cellists of any age would be pleased to emulate.
By the time Solti came to make his generally gracious and accomplished recording with the post-war Concertgebouw Orchestra attitudes to Mahler had become a good deal more rational, with conductors more and more inclined to put the symphony into the strait-jacket of a through-tempo, neo-classical symphonic style. A work which had shocked hypersensitive early critics ( ''circus in the cathedral'', ''sacrilegious buffoonery'') was sanitized and made either bright and breezy or mellow and relaxed in the Bruno Walter style.
Solti's reading remains graceful and relaxed, less driven at the climaxes than it used to be, and never flaccid. Like most modern Mahlerians, Solti underplays the dozens of hairpin dynamic markings in the score. Thus, the lack of dynamic grading in bar 39 of the first movement produces a curious, unexpected subito piano in bar 40. Solti is also hamstrung by the modern tendency to eschew the full portamento style (first movement, bars 285 ff.) and by the modern reluctance (not shared by Szell on CBS or, better still, Tennstedt on HMV) to drop back the tempo quite radically at figs. 4 and 7 of the same movement. Modern interpreters (Tennstedt again a notable exception) are also at odds with the older Mengelberg tradition which allows the Scherzo a darting, malevolent motion, with puckish wind solos wherever Mahler writes lustig. The trouble with the relaxed style suggested by Mahler's own initial marking is that the music's quick-witted, sardonic character is easily blunted and there's insufficient contrast, too with the sweet, schmaltzy Trio sections. In his new recording, Solti—already unhurrying in this movement—is even more relaxed.
The second half of the symphony is, for the most part, beautifully brought off by Solti, though after the cellos' sublime launching of the slow movement, the violins do some odd things: the second violins begin so quietly that they appear to come in a whole half a beat late on their first entry, and the first violins lack the 1960 Concertgebouw Orchestra's assurance on the high-lying D in bar 31. It's also difficult for the violins to play the perilously exposed espressivo E, A, F sharp in bars 41-2 without some portamento. Like Tennstedt and Karajan, Solti uses it on the way up but not down. (Abbado uses it down only, Kubelik on DG uses it neither way, Walter on CBS uses it both ways, as does Mengelberg, the downward arch played molto espressivo.)
Over all, and within the constraints of the unprevailing Mahler style, Solti's is a civilized and musicianly reading which gives the lie to the caricature of him as a specialist in high-tension music-making; and the performance is further enhanced by the contributions of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and the recording engineers. This wouldn't, I think, be my first choice. With Mengelberg (despite a waspish first oboe) hors concours, I'd be inclined to put Tennstedt and the LPO at the head of any current list. But it's a pleasing contribution to what is to date a strikingly consistent new Chicago cycle.'