photo by Lauren Sauder on Unsplash

If I’ve said it once here, I’ve said it a thousand times: I love a good list.

And what’s better than a list? A list in two dimensions. As in, like, a list just goes down, but a chart, oh a chart, it gives us lists against lists.

Also, I really just love listening to music.

But I recently-ish made two charts in my current always-with-me notebook, and what I’ve been thinking about recently is why I have those two charts featuring those two composers (about whom more presently) and why not some other composers who I also love.

But hey, it’s also an opportunity for some long-winded pontificating, even including an anecdote.

A few months ago, I was showing the score of Debussy’s La Mer to a French friend and she asked me why there were so many markings and directions on the score of how to play and “not too” this but “a little more” that in so many places and if this sort of thing was common.

Were it not already blatantly obvious, I’m no scholar, but I try to make sense of things, and I obsess over what I enjoy making sense of and learning about. The answer that I gave, which made sense in my head and hopefully does here, was that many, many years ago, with the music of people like Haydn or Mozart, there was an accepted, expected, assumed way that music was to be played, in keeping with the aesthetics and practice of the time. As those aesthetics changed, interpretive approaches varied and became more complex, even with music that had been written in the past, i.e. people began playing Beethoven much more like Brahms and Bruckner than like Mozart or Haydn. I refrain from speaking to the perceived correctness of this.

In short, as the composer’s intentions or wishes or vision became more individual and less standardized, there grew to be, especially so with some composers, a far greater degree of direction. Who else will I use as an example of this but Mahler? Even so, his contemporaries, and also composers later than him, would write symphonies that had similar complexity and richness but far less specific direction on what exactly to do.

What’s All This Then?

My thesis statement, then, is that I have come to feel there is one “right” way to play Beethoven, for example, and by right way, I mean there’s the general style I like, exemplified by the recordings of the Beethoven symphonies by the likes of Chailly, Harnoncourt, Zinman, Gardiner, and Leibowitz. And to be perfectly honest, my go-to is Chailly, but I may one day make a chart for LvB.

But for now, I have very little interest in comparing the interpretive differences of symphony cycles of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn (I mean, too many for a clean list, for starters), Schubert, or even Brahms. Also throw in Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, etc. etc.

So who are the two composers whose symphonies I’ve decided to listen to many, many times and make very broad, subjective ratings based on a smiley-face system of how much I enjoy the interpretations of each piece?

You guessed it: Mahler and Bruckner.

I wrote another article about my very different experiences warming up to symphonies of each of these men, but I recently discovered Dave Hurwitz’s YouTube Channel, and it was the inspiration I needed to go digging for some Mahler cycles he mentioned that I had never gotten around to listening to.

Seriously, I’m not the only one to make a long list of things to do or try or make or get based on a YouTube video of unboxings/reviews. I’m only human.

Thanks, YouTube

So I took many of Hurwitz’s recommendations as a jumping-off point, made a long list, made it slightly shorter, tried to see what I could get from Spotify, and spent too many hours making and organizing and cleaning up and double checking a folder of almost 30 playlists of the recordings of Mahler symphonies.

They were to be complete cycles (almost all of them), and I marked in red those that were somehow different from the others (the tenths that were adagio only, the fourths where they used a boy soprano in the finale, the sixths with the andante in second place, the firsts that included Blumine, the Das Lieds with two male vocalists, etc.) and began listening away.

I try to listen to one of every symphony from a different conductor before I repeat another symphony on the list. (Might you call this a serialist approach? The idea just struck me.) It’s still very early days, but I’m really enjoying the listening and relistening and rediscovering so far.

As I default to Chailly and the Gewandhaus for my Beethoven, I generally went to Boulez for Mahler (with the notable exception of the seventh symphony; I didn’t previously have any alternative, just NOT Boulez’s M7). He has his critics, but I very much appreciate his clarity.

I am finding now some new, absolutely breathtaking, outstanding, gasp-worthy, exhilarating recordings of the Mahler symphonies that bring such freshness to the listening experience. (They have also meant I’ve lost some of my previous admiration for Abbado’s Mahler…)

In fact, it was going so well that I decided I could use some rediscovering of Bruckner in my life, so he got the same treatment: research, listening, note-taking, list-making, and a page in the notebook. Here are both of them:

Mahler as follows:

• Abbado (DG)
• Abbado/Berlin
• Abbado/Lucerne
• Abravanel
• Bernstein (Sony)
• Bernstein (DG)
• Bertini
• Chailly
• Fischer Iván
• Gielen
• Haitink (Philips)
• Inbal (Frankfurt)
• Inbal (Tokyo)
• Janowski
• Jurowski
• Kubelik
• MTT
• Maazel
• Neumann
• Nott
• Ozawa
• Pešek
• Rattle
• Rattle
• Segerstam
• Sinopoli
• Solit
• Tennstedt
• Zinman
• Jansons/BRSO (a late addition)

I haven’t sorted out the cycles of Rattle with Berlin or Birmingham (in part because the Berlin cycle isn’t on Spotify anymore, at least where I live).

You’ll notice that there are some X’s on the paper itself, and some on sticky notes on the paper. X on the paper itself means this cycle doesn’t have this piece (usually missing Das Lied or no. 10, but also in Abbado’s case Mahler 8 with Lucerne because he shuffled off this mortal coil. Also his Berlin cycle includes the second symphony with Lucerne instead of Berlin, so that one is a duplicate).

The X’s on sticky notes on the page means I can’t get my hands on this recording yet. X’s across the board means I don’t have ANY of this cycle (Yeah, Bertini! Can’t get his at all, and I thought Janowski had a Mahler cycle because I thought for sure Hurwitz mentioned it, but then… that may have been my mistake because I can’t seem to find it anywhere.)

Bruckner as follows:

• Barenboim/Chicago
• Blomstedt/Leipzig
• Celibidache
• Chailly
• Haitink/RCO
• Inbal
• Janowski
• Jansons/BRSO
• Jochum (DG)
• Jochum (EMI)
• Karajan
• Nelsons
• Skrowaczewski
• Solti
• Tintner
• van Zweden
• Wand/Berlin- yeah it’s incomplete too
• Wand/Koln
• Young

For Bruckner, there’s the incomplete release on DG from Celibidache, but I thought he did record all of the (official numbered nonzero) symphonies, so I want to try to find them, even separately, before I mark official X’s in my notebook. The Jansons cycle is incomplete, and it’s unlikely that it will be finished since he is also no longer with us. Jaap van Zweden’s cycle seems either ongoing or unavailable for stream/sale in my region, and I don’t know if Nelsons has finished his cycle yet. So the only X’s I’ve put to actual paper are for the zero symphonies. Only Inbal, Jochum, Skrowaczewski, Tintner, and Young (from my list) give us all 11 symphonies, and only Inbal (again, of my list) gives a completion of the ninth, though I don’t know in what form.

So yeah, that’s that.

TL;DR:

What it comes down to is that the symphonies from these two gentlemen are so grand, so enormously epic, that it’s very unlikely that any one recording can be absolutely 100% spotlessly perfect. There are great interpretations that I was already familiar with and to which I may always be partial, but I have come across some real jaw-droppers (Solti’s Mahler 5 and Janowski’s Bruckner 8 were mind-blowingly, astoundingly good).

I guess I’m a bit of a purist with folks like Beethoven and Mozart, or else I’m just satisfied (thus far) that the recordings I know and love say what I want to hear Beethoven say. I may in the future want to hear more than my specific, chosen, trusted recordings of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Schubert, Mozart, etc., but for now, as a person who is almost morbidly a creature of habit, I’m immensely satisfied with my explorations of just two composers who already have so much to offer.

I’d love to hear your personal recommendations of any of these guys if you have them. (And yes, there are individual recordings of some of these pieces that aren’t a part of a cycle that I do love (Sanderling’s Mahler 6; Ozawa’s Mahler 2 with Saito Kinen; van Zweden’s Mahler 3; Muti’s Bruckner 9; Rattle’s Bruckner 9).

Who else may be subject to this treatment? With who else’s symphonies am I familiar enough, and with who else’s symphonies are we so spoiled for choice that I want to undertake a task like this? Who else’s symphonies (besides Mahler, Bruckner, Beethoven, and Brahms) (okay maybe Sibelius and Schumann, too)? (Don’t say Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky or Dvorak.)

Anyway, this article has gone on long enough. I’d love your feedback. More articles to come related to this idea/project/obsession.