E-Mail This Article to a Friend What the score tells me? (continued)

Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Sinfonie-Orchester Köln are consistently surprising, and not just because theirs is an intriguing Mahler Third from little-known performers. The second movement kicks off with a jaunty oboe and stays lilting, with many individual touches from the conductor. Marjana Lipovsek in the Nietzsche movement avoids operatic brooding (as well as the "sch" in "Mensch"); and with the children in "Es sungen drei Engel" less forwardly placed than usual, you can hear what the orchestra is doing. The finale has a churchy acoustic and well-characterized sections, and there are poignant details like the oscillating strings under the solo flute at bar 245. The first movement, on the other hand, is standard, the third-movement "posthorn" (hard to tell) is pedestrian, and at the end, the timpani bang away as usual. The bonus here is York Höller’s 2001 work Der ewige Tag, which twice quotes Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The release is also two discs for the price of one.

Rounding out what’s been a big year for the Third (Boulez and Tilson Thomas released recordings last year) is Jason Starr’s commentary/performance two-DVD set What the Universe Tells Me: Unraveling the Mysteries of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Running just under an hour, the first, feature disc provides a visual accompaniment to Mahler’s epic journey: galaxies spiraling, volcanoes erupting, flowers blowing in a meadow. Talking heads offer commentary that’s intercut with shots of the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Mignon Dunn performing the symphony under Glen Cortese; there are also 11 "mini-documentaries" ranging from "Musical Innovations in the First Movement" and "Schopenhauer: The World As Will and Idea" to "Stan Brakhage: Composing in a Trance" and "Science and Faith: A Mahlerian Contradiction?" The second disc, running 108 minutes, offers the complete performance by Cortese, Dunn, and the MSMSO.

The commentary, which addresses itself more to Mahler’s philosophical, psychological, and spiritual concerns than to his music, doesn’t provide much you wouldn’t find in a good CD liner note (for choice, conductor Michael Gielen’s on his own Hänssler recording). And the solid performance is, I presume, the same one that’s been available since 1999 on a Titanic CD. On the other hand, the talking heads include Mahler’s two quintessential biographers, Henry-Louis de La Grange and Donald Mitchell, and scholar Peter Franklin, who wrote the Cambridge University Press’s music handbook on the Third. And there’s no other DVD performance of this symphony, only the Leonard Bernstein/Vienna Philharmonic 1970s laserdisc. The set costs $40; you could do worse with your Mahler money.

The other new "Mahler" DVD is actually Annette Schreier’s 2001 documentary I Follow a Voice Within Me: A Portrait of the Singer Waltraud Meier, which follows the German soprano on stage and off as she sings Leonore in Fidelio, Marie in Wozzeck, and some of her Wagner roles: Ortrud, Sieglinde, Kundry, Venus, Isolde. But she also does two Mahler songs, "Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft" and "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen," with Daniel Barenboim at the piano in Chicago, and the disc ends with a complete Das Lied von der Erde in which she’s paired with tenor Torsten Kerl in a live 2001 performance in the Köln Philharmonie with Semyon Bychkov and the WDR Sinfonie-Orchester Köln that’s not available on CD. Unfortunately, it’s also not very idiomatic. Meier is even more forthright here than she was on her 1991 Das Lied CD with Barenboim, Siegfried Jerusalem, and the Chicago Symphony, but what works for Wagner doesn’t suit Mahler’s delicate Orientalism. In his 1966 recording with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau spins out "Mein Herz ist müde" ("My heart is weary") and "es gemahnt mich an den Schlaf" ("it puts me in mind to sleep") in "Der Einsame im Herbst"; Meier declaims them, and her front-loaded phrasing doesn’t have the right emotional weight. Her timbre isn’t right either: it’s all (beautiful) brass in a piece that calls for a woodwind sensibility. And Bychkov, impulsive and inorganic, is hardly recognizable as the conductor of the WDR Third.

LIKE BENJAMIN ZANDER, Michael Tilson Thomas makes controversial Mahler. His inflected, sometimes mannered approach reminds some of Bernstein (himself more controversial in life than in memory) and others of a Bernstein wanna-be. Tilson Thomas’s Third and Sixth are more studied than spontaneous, with distensions that don’t always follow the musical and emotional contours of Mahler’s writing. These are readings that have the instinct to be big and profound but not always the intuition. The Fifth that he and the San Francisco Symphony brought to Symphony Hall in March had even bigger distensions, phrases that seemed to die out into the oscillations of the universe; it was revelatory. But then his appearance on PBS’s Great Performances series last month revealed that he has no idea how to phrase a Tchaikovsky symphony; his Fourth was all posturing.

Tilson Thomas’s new Mahler Fourth is, like all of his San Francisco Mahler, beautifully played, and it’s less self-indulgent, but there’s a sleepy earnestness about it that suggests he’s not in on all the composer’s little jokes. Like Zander, he deploys the first and second violins antiphonally; you can hear why that’s so important at bar 119 of the opening movement (just before the high piping flute theme) when they pass a phrase back and forth. The big crisis at 221, where the trumpets overreach to A-flat, goes for little, however. There’s limpid horn playing in the recapitulation and in the obbligati of the second movement but not much shaping of sections, and the Poco Adagio, at 25:27 not very poco, is just slow and slower, all sensitivity and no sensibility, with the transitions now telegraphed and not a lot of body in the despair. The last three minutes of this movement are exquisite; at the end, you can hear the clarinets letting go. But Laura Claycomb’s voice in the "Himmlische Leben" finale is recessed, the bleating of the lamb and the lowing of the ox (both about to be slaughtered for the child’s table) are subdued, and Sankt Martha is all too reverent. The Fourth Symphony is Mahler’s humorous and disquieting look at a child’s demise — from its awareness of mortality to its dance with "Freund Hein" to its easeful death and sumptuous life in Heaven — in the wake of the Third Symphony’s hymn to love. Tilson Thomas is delicate with the notes but not with the concept.