E-Mail This Article to a Friend What the score tells me? Zander, Chailly, Bychkov, Tilson Thomas, Levine, Nézet-Séguin, Barbirolli, and the Kaplan Foundation go in search of that old-time Mahler BY JEFFREY GANTZ

George Balanchine, Yasujiro Ozu, and James Joyce’s Ulysses are among those 20th-century luminaries celebrating their centennials this year and getting due recognition. Gustav Mahler would have been 144 years old this past July 7, hardly a milestone birthday, and yet recordings old and new continue to pour forth and controversial points in his works continue to be debated while the media — academic and popular — try to figure out why this composer has so eclipsed contemporaries like Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss in popularity. Even the recent complete recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies by David Zinman, Simon Rattle, and Claudio Abbado haven’t generated the buzz that Mahler does.

So far this year, it’s the Third and Fourth Symphonies that have gotten the most attention, with three high-profile conductors continuing their journey through the Mahler canon. Boston Philharmonic director Benjamin Zander has added No. 3 to his list; Nos. 1, 2, 7, and 8 remain (he’s not committed himself to a "performing version" of the unfinished No. 10). Riccardo Chailly has also released No. 3; his set (which includes No. 10) now wants only the Ninth. Michael Tilson Thomas, whose recordings with the San Francisco Symphony are on the orchestra’s own label, has added No. 4 to Nos. 1, 3, and 6. Reissues of No. 3 by Rafael Kubelik and No. 4 by incoming Boston Symphony Orchestra director James Levine, on the other hand, raise the question of whether earlier generations had a better grasp of Mahler’s idiom. And though there are a couple of new Mahler DVDs out, one featuring a complete performance of the Third, the other of Das Lied von der Erde, it’s a Web site publication by the Kaplan Foundation (that’s the Gilbert Kaplan who conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony all over the world) devoted to the order of the inner movements in the Sixth Symphony that’ll probably be the talk of the Mahler global village.

Ben Zander’s Third, which he performs with the Philharmonia of London, and which comes with the usual free lecture disc, has garnered the usual range of bouquets and brickbats. Reviewing this recording for the English on-line site Music Web (www.musicweb.co.uk), Tony Duggan suggests that "conductors of the present day have lost touch with the earthiness, the unalloyed warmth of heart, the poetry and sheer effrontery that this symphony contains in its highways and byways and which their elders seemed to latch on to as if it were second nature"; in this context, he deems Zander’s Third, like the recent releases from Abbado, Tilson Thomas, Michael Gielen, and Andrew Litton, "disappointing." And after listening to an unreleased performance by Berthold Goldschmidt (Simon Rattle’s mentor) with the Philharmonia from 1960, he concludes that "the Philharmonia of 1960 knew their Mahler much more intimately than their counterparts of 2003," even though Goldschmidt’s outfit had never played the work before.

When you compare Zander’s Third with the 1967 live performance from Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony that’s been released on Audite, it’s all too easy to hear what Duggan is missing. Next to Kubelik or John Barbirolli or Jascha Horenstein or Leonard Bernstein, Zander — like Abbado, Tilson Thomas, Gielen, Litton, Pierre Boulez, and just about every modern conductor this side of Klaus Tennstedt — seems to be performing "What the Score Tells Me." Not that fidelity to Mahler’s hyper-marked score is a bad thing. But Kubelik, Barbirolli, Horenstein, and Bernstein have a swagger that’s missing from contemporary performances, and the raucous chatter of Kubelik’s woodwinds at the beginning of "What the Animals Tell Me" makes Zander and the rest sound generic. Even the score doesn’t always come through in this Telarc recording: the counterpointing upper cello line at bars 5 through 7 of the finale is inaudible, and Mahler’s tempo shifts ("Nicht mehr so breit"/"No longer so broad" at bars 41 and 124, "Immer breiter"/"Ever broader" at 206) are minimally executed.

As for the Third’s touchstones: Zander takes the first-movement coda at a blur, his interpretation of Mahler’s "Sehr drängend" ("Press forward"). His posthorn — a real one, not a trumpet or a flügelhorn — is very distant, a distinctive and effective touch, though it renders the instrument a ghostly presence. The "bird of the night" oboe and cor anglais glissandi in the Nietzsche movement are subtle but palpable. And Zander’s treatment of the final bars is one of the best on record. Unlike the many conductors (including Kubelik and Barbirolli) who press forward at the end, he observes the "Bis zum Schluß breit"/"Broad to the end" marking at bar 256, and unlike almost every other conductor, he has the timpani play f (rather than ff), as marked, so that the brass dominate, as Mahler meant them to. Most Mahler thirds finish in a blaze of martial glory; this one sounds like the peroration of Götterdämmerung.

The 76:30 lecture disc is equal parts information and enthusiasm; a little less hyperbole (at one point, we’re told that the trombones make "an incredible sound never before heard in the history of music") would make it seem less like advertising. The best feature is the opportunity to hear what a trumpet, a flügelhorn, and a posthorn sound like in the same solo passage from the third movement. It’s typical of Zander that he would track down (in a shop in Vienna) the instrument Mahler asked for; The sad thing is, it hardly makes a difference: as recorded by Telarc, the Philharmonia sounds polite, less of a Mahler orchestra than Zander’s own Boston Philharmonic. The upside is that you get all three discs for the price of one.

There are no surprises from Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as they near the end of their Mahler cycle. The sound is plush but not polished, the tempi are expansive but not elongated, the phrasing is natural and responsive. What’s missing is the sense of personal involvement and urgency that was never in doubt with Barbirolli or Bernstein. Chailly’s movements don’t come to a point so much as come to a stop. And though his orchestra, as recorded by Decca, makes a better first impression than Zander’s, that doesn’t always hold up: in the last movement, his tempo shifts are barely more marked than Zander’s, and the phrasing isn’t as weighted, so it has less emotional impact. As a bonus, there’s the Bach Suite, which Mahler compiled from the B-minor and D-major Orchestral Suites. The two CDs go for the price of two, the two compatible CD/SACDs for the price of just one.