Mahler Symphony No 3 album review – slightly sub-par outing for ‘least hysterical' work
Though these days Mahler is generally regarded as an Austrian composer, and spent the last decade of his life living and working in Vienna, he was born in Kaliště, in eastern Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austrian empire and is now in the Czech Republic. On disc at least the Czech Philharmonic, the country's leading orchestra and in the right repertoire one of Europe's finest, never seems to have taken Mahler's music to its heart. But chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is currently recording a cycle of the Mahler symphonies with the orchestra for Pentatone, and the release of the Third Symphony marks the halfway point of their project.
In his sleeve note, Bychkov reveals that it was hearing a rehearsal of part of the Third Symphony when he was a boy chorister in Leningrad that fired his enthusiasm for Mahler. It's strange then that he is also quoted as maintaining that the Third contains some of the composer's 'least hysterical' music, an odd compliment (if that is what it is) for a work which perhaps more than any other by Mahler conforms to its composer's maxim that 'a symphony should contain the world'.
In a curious way, Bychkov's approach to this longest of Mahler's scores (104 minutes in this performance) reinforces the idea that this is the least excitable of them; it would be misleading to characterise all of his performance as prosaic, but there is something rather matter-of-fact about a lot of the playing, and even in the wonderful hymn-like finale, the music rarely suggests the kind of ecstatic intensity that truly outstanding performances of the Third achieve. Claudio Abbado's incandescent account with the Berlin Philharmonic from the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1999 (Deutsche Grammophon), or Bernard Haitink's with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, also recorded live (BR Klassik), attain levels of intensity that Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic never approach.
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