''A music historian with a taste for melodrama might be tempted to describe Mahler's Seventh Symphony as the musical composition which embodies the precise moment of Romanticism's collapse—a collapse which took traditional symphonic form and tonality down with it, as Mahler's Viennese friend Arnold Schoenberg was the first to recognize.'' With these words, AW's note wryly anticipates the character of Sinopoli's latest exercise in radical deconstruction. The conductor's Mahler is rarely uncontroversial, but this recording of No. 7 strikes me as an extreme example of interpretative de-bagging. Where in a performance like Solti's the work becomes a brassily optimistic concerto for orchestra—a simpler, sunnier view which finds endorsement in Michael Kennedy's commentary—Sinopoli takes us much further in the opposite direction. There are times when his tempos recall the lumbering trudge of late Klemperer (EMI, 9/69—nla), except that they rarely settle for long. As in his rather less problematic account of the Sixth (DG, 1/88), Sinopoli has the benefit of first-rate playing from the Philharmonia and ample yet detailed sonics from DG. What he does with them is more deeply unsettling, and intentionally so.
The very opening gestures are re-imagined, with the strings' functionally accompanimental figuration encouraged to dominate the texture. Throughout, Sinopoli is at pains to make the sonorities seem gaunt, strange and new. While the main body of the movement is slow, the effect is anything but monolithic. The second subject is taken at a pace and in a manner that could only be reckoned indulgent in more conventional, less psychologically probing hands. Here the treacly emotionalism looks to be a sort of double bluff. In the recapitulation, Sinopoli is again obsessed with the re-layering of detail. Some features, like the major-minor triad from the Sixth, are given exceptional prominence; others simply disappear. It may all be deeply felt—there are some effortful post-Bernstein groans from the podium—but, following a notably leaden patch from 18'56'', the music tends to go off the rails, apparently embracing inarticulacy, deliberately starved of the expressive force that comes with received meaning.
In the first Nachtmusik, Mahler's sound-world of hysterical precision is knocked off its fin de siecle moorings and brought firmly into our own time. When we encounter the motif cribbed by Shostakovich for his own Sixth Symphony it sounds as much like Shostakovich as Mahler and not a great deal like either. Idiomatic or not, it would be churlish to ignore some magical playing hereabouts. The central scherzo is appropriately eerie, Sinopoli eliciting suitably exaggerated cries of alarm plus some unusually beefy articulation from the lower strings. The second Nachtmusik is harder to take, inordinately sluggish at 17'35'' and rendered charmless seemingly by design, with some carefully graceless horn encouraged to bludgeon through the texture in unexpected places. In the finale, the conductor displays none of Bernstein's mysterious ability to fuse the detailed characterization of its disparate elements into a convincingly inevitable whole. Indeed, Sinopoli seems to take the view that the music isn't fragmented enough, zeroing in on the piccolo's stratospheric intrusions, coaxing out the potential for instability in what is already Mahler's least obviously cogent symphonic utterance.
The coupling is an important Kindertotenlieder, for all that Bryn Terfel's priorities seem rather different from those of his accompanists. He sings with his customary beauty of tone, grieving with dignified restraint, while Sinopoli has the orchestra going its own way when he can, now slow and starkly unmoulded, now swollen with strictly short-term passions. Sinopoli sets a tempo for the fourth song only to dispute it straight away—a metaphor for the contradictory feelings of the bereaved? The few bars of orchestral scene-setting which launch the great final song, ''In diesem Wetter'', are almost unrecognizable here, delivered with an awesome venom and power more usually associated with the start of the Resurrection Symphony. And yet the woodwind playing in the third song, ''Wenn dein Mutterlein'', is curiously inexpressive. Taken as a whole, Sinopoli's package is fascinating and infuriating by turns—anything less like a 'safe' recommendation is impossible to imagine.
Following their recent success with his one-disc Ninth (2/94), Intercord have managed to squeeze Michael Gielen's account of No. 7 on to a single CD, competing directly with, among others, Rattle's live version and the more venerable Solti. Once again, Gielen demonstrates an iron grip; his orchestra, though tonally less refulgent than the bigger names, is uncommonly well prepared. Even if he has no truck with Sinopoli's brand of post-modern expressivity, Gielen's Mahler sounds unashamedly contemporary. He takes nothing for granted, probing the text for analytical insights in what is basically a conventional reading. No doubt he will seem a little stern and unbending to those weaned on Bernstein (and Bernstein's rubato). Thus, after a promising start with keenly shrieking clarinets at 0'29'', the central scherzo seems just a little calculating, at least in retrospect, something much more noticeable in the second Nachtmusik, almost perfunctory at 12'54'' with the amoroso aspect knowingly undersold. On the other hand, the first movement is mercifully taut, its final pages brought off with considerable aplomb; the first Nachtmusik is reasonably atmospheric as well as clear-eyed, and the finale brings real sense of direction and a decent rush of adrenalin at the close. Perhaps Gielen is more satisfying in the fast lacerating music than in those sections which require a semblance of Viennese charm (however ironically meant). Nevertheless, for anyone seeking linear clarity rather than emotional catharsis in their Mahler this is well worth seeking out. The recording, more enclosed than DG's for Sinopoli, is eminently clean.'