MAHLER Symphony 2

 

Lisa Milne, soprano

Birgit Remmert - alto

 

The Hungarian Radio Choir Kálmán Strausz, chorus master

Budapest Festival Orchestra / Iván Fischer

 

Mahler's Second Symphony, "Resurrection" (1894) is a gigantic work of enormous proportions, extreme contrasts, and a score that surpasses even his First Symphony from two years earlier.Ten horns, eight trumpets, two harps, organ, five percussionists, two vocal soloists (soprano and alto), as well as a large mixed chorus, fill the podium. And behind all this, invisible, is a "Fernorchester" (distant orchestra) as a symbol of "the resurrection".

 

Mahler was famously pernickety about the way he wanted his music performed, littering his scores with expression marks and wordy notes. But can these be followed too doggedly? This question arose upon listening to this second instalment in the Budapest Festival Orchestra's Mahler cycle for Channel. Conductor Iván Fischer is famous, too, for his intensive rehearsal regime with his orchestra, and I cannot help feeling he has followed Mahler's instructions so closely as to refine things just a little too far, robbing the music of spontaneity, and the big, climactic passages of visceral raw edge.

Yet how beautiful the playing is! The second movement – so often treated as a lull between the more exciting first and third – had me gripped by its suavity and detail; and Fischer's observance of true pianissimos is on a par with Rattle's and Abbado's. Yet while the two soloists are excellent, the choir lacks a sense of awe, and, despite Fischer's undoubted long-term view of the music's larger spans, this Resurrection as a whole seems too concerned with the here-and-now rather than the life thereafter.

Matthew Rye, Telegraph

 

Channel Classics 2SACDs CCSSA23506