Though it was launched without a great deal of fanfare, five years before he took over as the Bavarian Radio Symphony’s chief conductor, Simon Rattle’s Mahler series with the Munich-based orchestra was already promising to be one of the most significant additions to the composer’s discography in recent years. Rattle’s accounts of Das Lied von der Erde and the Sixth and Ninth Symphonies have already appeared, all of them taken from performances in the Isarphilharmonie im Gasteig in Munich, and the new version of the Seventh was recorded there last November.
When complete, this will be Rattle’s second Mahler survey, following his cycle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s and 90s (he went on to rerecord some of the symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker too, but not all of them). Inevitably, there are distinct differences in his approach to the Seventh across the 30-odd years that separate the Birmingham and Munich versions, as well as between this latest one and a live recording that was included in a composite box of the Mahler symphonies issued by the Berlin Philharmonic four years ago.
It’s in the outer movements that Rattle’s approach has evolved most significantly, while in the central triptych – the two spectral Nachtmusik that frame a sardonic scherzo – it’s the sheer brilliance of the Bavarian RSO’s playing that grabs the attention, every detail and instrumental effect shiveringly vivid, and all perfectly captured in sound that is so much better than either of Rattle’s earlier versions.
The Munich Rattle seems to resist the temptation to micromanage every phrase in the way that the Berlin Rattle sometimes tended to, and in his reading of the opening movement of the Seventh, and especially in its usually problematic finale, that directness pays dividends. There’s no attempt to smooth over the grotesquely abrupt, almost comedic transitions in the finale, so that the movement emerges as what it is: Mahler’s most provocative challenge to the conventions of symphonic continuity. Alongside the versions by Claudio Abbado from Berlin and Lucerne, and Riccardo Chailly’s with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, this must now be one of the finest Mahler 7s on disc.
Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
