by Ryan Ross
The conventional wisdom is that Mahler 7 is an enigmatic work. But as I have said elsewhere, it is not terribly enigmatic if you do a little homework and apply some imagination. In his program notes to the present release, Thomas May provides a bit of the former, pointing out Alma Mahler’s and Henry-Louis de la Grange’s testimony that the first four movements show the composer preoccupied with positive tropes from favorite German literature: “visions of Eichendorff’s poetry, rippling fountains, German Romanticism.” So far so good. But then May seems as hung up by the “affirmative” finale as La Grange and Theodor W. Adorno were before him. Why does this boisterous span abruptly end the symphony? Well, maybe it’s not really affirmative. If we remember that Mahler had been conducting Tristan und Isolde with great success in the years surrounding this symphony’s composition and recall what goes on in the second act of Wagner’s opera, it’s not far-fetched to see the diurnal finale as tragic in its own way. The enchanting realm of night vanishes. A forbidden tryst comes to an end. Magic gives way to bustling mundanity.
Gianandrea Noseda has the bustling mundanity part of the Seventh down pat. Maybe too pat. Little in this performance suggests familiarity with Eichendorff, Novalis, or their world. Here’s the issue in a nutshell: the fast parts are too frenetically empty, and the slow parts aren’t atmospheric enough. The bolder, march-like sections in the first movement need a more bracing sound, with articulation that is sculpted instead of clangy. There is a deficit of conception here and in the Schattenhaft (“shadowy”) third movement. I was not reminded of shadows so much as a drying machine cycle. Similar misgivings manifested throughout.
More disappointing still are the two Nachtmusik (“night music”) movements. Noseda almost entirely misses the importance of several elements in them. The ethereal horn calls of the first often appear with the cowbell. Mahler had a special affinity for the cowbell, associating its sounds with the last things heard as one leaves civilization to venture beyond. The timbres need a certain sensitivity here. Instead, they’re slightly plunky. Ditto the distant trumpet calls at Rehearsal 95. Think of the posthorn in Eichendorff’s Sehnsucht, or the background hunting horns in Act II of Tristan. True, the closing measures of the movement come closer to this ideal, but many other opportunities were missed. The second Nachtmusik simply needs more warmth and elegance. Clocking in at 12:08, it just zooms by, making the gentle ostinato figures seem more like a sewing machine than the evocation of evening fountains and breezes. Again, the articulations are too choppy and somewhat dry.
The finale comes off better for two reasons. First, if the orchestral players are skilled (which they certainly are here), it is the hardest part to mess up interpretively. Second and relatedly, it blunts the negative impact of Noseda’s slightly spasmodic approach to quicker passages. In other words, things are supposed to sound a bit bombastic; this covers for him to a large extent. That all said, the articulation here still feels a bit less than polished; even a hectic farewell needs more differentiation than Noseda can give it. The best way to illustrate this is by calling attention to a secondary melody’s later entry at Rehearsal 269. This is a kind of rapid march parody that Noseda and his group nail. But too often the rest of the symphony (never mind the movement) sounds too much like this particular juncture! We need greater range than he can supply. If the finale’s daylight is tragic precisely because it dissolves the nocturnal world, then a conductor must make that nocturnal world palpable. Noseda doesn’t.
The Mahler symphonies have become a runaway bandwagon. Listening to one lackluster recording after another, I keep thinking how a command of the little things in this music adds up to big things, and how few conductors actually wield this command. If the Seventh is not as enigmatic as many let on, it nonetheless requires a robust toolkit to bring off convincingly in all its facets. I don’t need a third hand to count the recordings that truly accomplish this. Two of these remain towering benchmarks: Abbado with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (DG 445 513-2), and Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic (DG 419-211-2). Several more are fine indeed, but the group remains rarefied. Certainly Noseda and the NSO haven’t entered it.
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