E-Mail This Article to a Friend What’s the score? Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony raises, once again, fundamental questions about life, death, and music BY JEFFREY GANTZ

What is music? That’s a question you might expect to be posed by the latest Einstürzende Neubauten creation, but not by the umpteenth recording of Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. All the same, two new releases of that work will have listeners asking once again whether music — at least the classical kind — resides on the pages of the score or in the hearts and minds of the performers. If a conductor faithfully communicates every jot and tittle of a score to the orchestra and the orchestra plays precisely to his direction, does a great performance result? Or does the performance of a piece of music require something that can’t be written down by the composer?

The circumstances of these new releases could scarcely be more different (each, however, is on two discs that sell for the price of one). Testament is a small, independent English label that has been issuing older, mostly live performances that had not previously been available; this one appears to originate in a mono radio broadcast. The son of an Italian bandmaster, Sir John Barbirolli is revered in England for his spiritual, heartfelt approach to music, and his EMI recordings of Mahler’s Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies are considered classics there, but in America he’s merely a cult favorite whose popularity as a Mahler interpreter has never approached that of Leonard Bernstein or Georg Solti or Bruno Walter. Gilbert Kaplan, on the other hand, is an American financial expert who fell in love with the Resurrection Symphony and decided that he wanted to conduct it, even though he had no musical background. He hired teachers; he engaged orchestras; he became known as the man who travels around the world to lead performances of the Resurrection. Initially released on the small Carlton label (the same one that issued Benjamin Zander’s 1994 Boston Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Sixth), his 1987 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra elicited critical respect, if not raves. When in 1996 Conifer repackaged it with Kaplan’s performance of the Adagietto from the Mahler Fifth, the Mahler piano rolls, an interactive CD-ROM picture album, recorded remembrances by musicians who performed with Mahler, a facsimile of the 1897 first edition of the score, and a "liner booklet" that was more like a small book, the result became a Mahler bestseller, as well it deserved to.

Kaplan has since become a major Mahler player. He worked with musicologist Renate Stark-Voit to produce a new critical edition of the score that will be published next year by the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in conjunction with his own Kaplan Foundation. Last month, the New York Times ran his essay about the disputed order of movements in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (the formal paper, by the distinguished recording engineer Jerry Bruck, will be published by the Kaplan Foundation this spring). And for his second recording of the Resurrection, Kaplan leads one of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic (the same outfit Mahler directed), and he’s on the world’s most prestigious classical-music label. Deutsche Grammophon doesn’t really need another Resurrection: it has in its catalogue versions by Rafael Kubelik, Leonard Bernstein, Giuseppe Sinopoli, and Claudio Abbado (twice, including a 1992 effort with the Vienna Phil). Still, you can understand the project’s appeal: if Kaplan could sell mega-units with the LSO on Carlton/Conifer, wouldn’t the sky be the limit with the Vienna Phil and DG? This recording would, moreover, be the first to use the new critical edition, which is said to incorporate more than 400 of Mahler’s final thoughts.

It’s too soon to know whether this release will break the Mahler bank. But a critical breakthrough seems unlikely. Writing for the Web site Classics Today, David Hurwitz gave it 8 out of 10 despite complaining of stiffness in the scherzo and the "wobbly and unattractive singing" of German mezzo-soprano Nadja Michael. Former Cambridge University philosophy lecturer Michael Tanner in International Record Review made reference to its "crude externality, the substitution of gesture for structure, its super glossy orchestral texture" and dismissed it as "lurid." Andrew Farach-Colton in the Gramophone noted that the new version, "for all its sonic advantages and interpretive maturity, frequently seems earthbound" and wound up expressing a preference for the 1987 LSO reading. Part of the problem is that since the new critical edition isn’t available to the critics, no one’s in a position to judge how important the changes are or to what extent Kaplan realizes them in this performance. But the underlying question remains whether a thorough knowledge of the score — and you could make the case that Gilbert Kaplan knows this score better than anyone since Gustav himself — is an adequate basis on which to build a reading of the symphony.

The work itself is not as straightforward as it might appear. In the first movement, Mahler explained, we’re at the funeral of the hero of his First Symphony. In the second-movement ländler, we reflect on "earlier days of shared happiness with the departed"; in the third-movement scherzo, "the reality of life returns, and the world appears distorted and crazy." Mahler was at a loss as to how to redeem this beginning until, in 1894, he attended the funeral of conductor Hans von Bülow and heard the choir sing Friedrich Klopstock’s Auferstehen ("Rise again") chorale; he promptly created a fourth movement out of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn song "Urlicht" ("Primordial Light") and an Apocalyptic fifth that culminates in Klopstock’s Resurrection ode. Mahler’s detractors argue, with some justification, that the symphony resolves itself only through a deus ex machina. But apart from the complicated relationship between the scherzo and its antecedent Wunderhorn song "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" (in which St. Anthony finds the church empty so he goes to preach to the fish), there’s the symphony’s heritage from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The way the downward-slipping cellos and basses in bars 11-13 of the opening movement duplicate a moment in the first act of Die Walküre after Hunding orders Sieglinde to prepare food and drink could be just a coincidence if it weren’t that Mahler goes on to make one of Wagner’s central motifs the basis for his finale. "Ewig war ich, ewig bin ich" ("Eternal was I, eternal am I"), Brünnhilde sings to Siegfried in the last scene of Siegfried, after he’s penetrated the ring of fire and awakened her, and that’s the melody, note for note, of the "Resurrection" theme. Did Mahler have an ur/über-plan for his Second Symphony that transcended Christian resurrection?

What’s obvious from the opening moments of Gilbert Kaplan’s DG Resurrection is that there’s no plan to transcend the notes: the outbursts in the cellos and basses sound literal, static, and a shade light. Throughout there’s no "slancio" (a word meaning "thrust" that describes the way Italians lean into stressed syllables), and though there are sensitively phrased lyric passages (like the horns in the restatement of the first movement’s second subject), they never open out into Christianity, Wagner, or anything bigger than a succession of notes. There’s not much bottom or percussion, and the "distant" brass in the finale are very distant for a recording (they might have sounded fine live), but the real problem is that the music sounds studied and careful where it needs to sound like, well, music. The violin solo at bar 216 of the first movement seems to be picking its way down a puddly sidewalk; the reprise of the first theme that starts up at bar 244 has no fiber. The ländler is too slow and self-conscious to have any dance feel to it; the trio doesn’t establish much tempo contrast. The scherzo goes at a steady clip, and Kaplan underlines both the cello glissandi at bars 96-97 and the low growl of the trombones and the tuba beginning at bar 440; but the brass don’t move forward at bar 212 where Mahler writes, "Vorwärts," and at bar 271, when the trumpets swim up like the Rhinemaidens to suggest a better world, you’d never guess that anything special had just happened. Nadja Michael doesn’t sound as wobbly to my ears as she does to some, but there’s nothing special about her "Urlicht." In the finale, both Michael and soprano Latonia Moore are stretched by static tempos that make phrasing difficult, if not impossible, and at times the orchestra is too loud for them. And like Michael Tanner, I hear gesture instead of structure. The last pages in particular sound exactly the way they look on the page: inert, fragmented, waiting for a conductor to breathe into them, to believe in them. Kaplan has said that though he can’t embrace the notion of life after death, the symphony can still have great meaning: "self-renewal, rebirth during your own lifetime, and recommitment to everything that is important." That’s exactly what his Resurrection sounds like, a song of the self.

It’s not that Sir John Barbirolli is self-effacing in his Resurrection — indeed, you can hear him humming along from time to time, and it’s not an enhancement. The sound of this 1965 broadcast is only fair, the ensemble bespeaks the presence of a non-disciplinarian guest conductor on the podium, and there are moments that defy explanation, like the way Barbirolli begins to speed up at bar 147 of the first movement, a full 16 measures before Mahler asks the conductor to do so. It’s a reminder that there’s a lot to be said for the kind of objectivity and fidelity that Kaplan espouses. But from the opening measure, Barbirolli has the cellos and basses dig in in a way that tells you his Resurrection is about life and death, not self-renewal. The trumpet-introduced trio of his scherzo is a world apart, a foreshadowing of the paradise that mezzo-soprano Janet Baker creates in "Urlicht," and in the finale Baker and soprano Maria Stader make Nadja Michael and Latonia Moore sound colorless and uncommitted. In the process of turning the score into music, Barbirolli adds to, and sometimes subtracts from, what Mahler wrote down. That’s the human element in what will always be a performing art. Without it, music is just a bunch of notes.