Mahler at the Concertgebouw — The Chief Conductors Edition

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Symphonies Nos. 1–9, Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 10 (Deryck Cooke performing version)
Orchestra: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Conductors: Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly, Mariss Jansons, Daniele Gatti
Recordings: live radio broadcasts from the Concertgebouw, 1939–2016
Label: RCO Live / AVROTROS – 15 CDs, limited edition box set

Release: May 2025, to coincide with the Amsterdam Mahler Festival

A Century of Mahler, an Edition That Falls Short

A rich fifteen-disc box set that sets out to retrace the course of one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, from Mengelberg in 1939 to Daniele Gatti in 2016. The inheritance is uneven by definition, but a few considerable and historic summits amply justify acquiring this set, issued for the Amsterdam Mahler Festival of May 2025.

There are halls and orchestras bound to a composer. There are also composers bound to a hall. Mahler and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam are both at once. Mahler conducted there from 1903 to 1911; Mengelberg did the rest.

The admiration was mutual. The day after one of his concerts, the composer returned to the evening in writing. He could not imagine a better audience. The orchestra had overwhelmed him by the quality of its preparation. So Amsterdam has Mahlerian culture in its DNA: a lineage, a history, an insoluble bond, a discography of immense quality.

The very principle of such a box set therefore held out the prospect of a definitive, historic cycle. Unfortunately, while certain performances will rouse the enthusiasm of any informed listener, the editorial choices and a few of the other symphonies belong more to the anecdotal.

What is worth the journey

Das Lied von der Erde, Bernard Haitink, 2006. Bernard Haitink’s Das Lied von der Erde rises to the summit. At eighty, the sage has nothing left to prove, and the orchestra follows him, evidently, as one man. The dark timbre of Anna Larsson, burnished, expressive, never begs. Robert Dean Smith is a brighter tenor; he convinces, passing without too much effort above the orchestra in the drinking song and in “Von der Jugend”. But in the “Abschied”, Haitink takes half an hour, and nothing drags. And there he sculpts time, watches death arrive. So yes: listen to the oboe, listen to the storm still distant, listen to the disappearance of a musical world. Few orchestras manage to reach that level of musical spirituality. Then come the closing bars, dissolving into silence with a delicacy very rarely rendered on disc.

Symphony No. 10, Riccardo Chailly, 2000. The real good surprise of the box is the Tenth Symphony in its completed version, which Chailly had already recorded in Berlin in 1986, with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, for Decca. Here one feels him more at ease. One feels him able to show everything this symphony has of the modernist. The Adagio is remarkably true: it breathes all the way to the harrowing summit of the brass, then to the distant disintegration. Nothing is missing from this fine reading, neither the grimacing, skeletal rictus of the Scherzo, nor the sarcastic clatter of the brief Purgatorio, nor the reeling Ländler, that distant echo of Bruckner; and Chailly allows himself a few liberties before the funeral march of the finale. Here is a conductor who knows this score, who loves it, and who manages at last to show the world Mahler was about to enter, had death not interrupted him.

The documents

Symphony No. 4, Willem Mengelberg, 1939. November 1939, a few months before the collapse: Mengelberg says everything. This is the oldest performance in the box, in a new transfer. Mengelberg is obviously no reader of scores. He remakes the score, as Furtwängler did in Beethoven. The elastic rubato, the extreme and fluctuating tempi, the reshaping of the narrative, the hiatuses. Nothing is missing from this reading either, and it will leave nobody indifferent. From the sleigh bells of the opening to the phrases that breathe. Jo Vincent sings the finale with a very sweet timbre, and with a vibrato our ear will probably find dated today. The listener will find this irresistible or downright unbearable. It depends. There will be no middle position.

Symphony No. 3, Eduard van Beinum, 1957. A mono radio tape, with a certain distortion in the fortissimos, a somewhat constrained dynamic range. The transfer, unfortunately uncredited like all the others, does its office. The sound of the 1950s is in any case thoroughly present, and it is quite fascinating. There is the bite of the woodwind, there are the trombones with their bright sound, there are the trumpets vibrating with a colour now vanished. Van Beinum sculpts rusticity. He dares to go where our contemporaries grow heavy. He knows how to make the strings bite into those martial, sometimes childlike rhythms, with an appetite no longer asked of them. Van Beinum had recorded his Fourth in the studio for Decca, in 1952: this Third is the most moving evidence of what he could do with Mahler in concert.

Performances that are, alas, routine

Symphony No. 5, Riccardo Chailly, 1997. Chailly’s Fifth, of which one may wonder whether it is not a strict duplicate of the disc that exists on Decca, and which is one of the summits of the discography. It is therefore the same disc, the same tempi; the circumstances differ a little, but it brings nothing beyond what we already knew. That reference, we already owned.

Symphony No. 1, Riccardo Chailly, 1999. Obviously, the sound, the sumptuousness of the playing, the harp glissandi: it is all there. But, surprisingly, and as sometimes happens with that illustrious Amsterdam orchestra, the reading can seem a touch too smooth, perhaps a little lukewarm. And only the finale manages to raise a few shivers. Chailly, a good opera conductor, manages to underline certain operatic echoes.

Symphony No. 2, Daniele Gatti, 2016. Gatti’s Second Symphony will divide opinion. Gatti refuses the spiritual and offers us an earthbound, even chthonic reading, in the deeply incarnate and low strings, in the rumbling of the double basses. The opening is quite arresting, but what follows deteriorates, with a granite finale in the wrong sense of the word, heavy, turning curiously in the void. Transcendence is refused us, and one can only think of Klemperer’s heavy but interesting attempts in the Seventh. Karen Cargill gives us an “Urlicht” that is firm, warm, certainly. Chen Reiss is in her place. But it has to be admitted that this Second Symphony misses its mark.

Symphony No. 6, Bernard Haitink, 2001. The Sixth, under Haitink, is evidently of a very fine fidelity to the text, of an exceptional clarity: everything is laid out with fluency and method. But perhaps, here again, it is the absence of risk that one will remember. If the hammer blows land true, they do not reach us. And the discographic competition is implacable. From Szell to Bernstein and on to Abbado, this is another idea of the tragic, no doubt, here — but a tragic one would dare to call almost smiling, in this Sixth that will be respected for its conductor.

Symphony No. 7, Mariss Jansons, 2016. The Seventh Symphony, under Jansons, is perhaps at once the most disappointing of the project and the most revealing. Here again, the almost Viennese elegance of the Nachtmusik movements shines with a wholly Straussian gleam. The first movement, that said, has no pulse: it advances without necessity. The Scherzo, here again almost macabre, catches only a distracted ear at times. But the closing Rondo, which ought to be made of irony, of exuberance, of avowed parodic quotation, before ending in a triumph that is almost circus — Jansons makes of it a smooth celebration. There is nothing strange about it. And the earlier Oslo performance no doubt had more verve.

Symphony No. 8, Mariss Jansons, 2011. Jansons’s Eighth allows the Concertgebouw to dare excess, and the conductor’s choral preparation proves thoroughly worthwhile here. The Veni Creator never sinks into bombast. As for the tenor, he perhaps lacks a little heroic weight. Jansons — and this is entirely to his credit, entirely to his talent — tends to smooth over the transitions and to refuse effects. But in this work, so very difficult to bring off, and which Abbado himself did not care to conduct, one must be at once emphatic, optimistic, spiritual, and in the end rather un-Mahlerian.

Symphony No. 9, Bernard Haitink, 2011. Haitink’s Ninth is marked once again by its breathing. But, once again, too sensible, too spacious, too clean: the savagery is missing. Fortunately, the Adagio remains. And there, the beauty of the orchestra is staggering. The strings at once harrowing, radiant, by turns silken and tragic. As the music, and therefore life, withdraws. There is here no anguish, no cry, but an autumnal resignation accepted, far from certain nightmarish visions.

The editorial weakness

From an institution of this standing, and a project tied to a major festival, one expects a faultless edition. The booklet does not quite get there. It does carry an essay by Dirk Luijmes, in Dutch and English, and the contents listing gives the dates, from 1939 to 2016, along with the broadcasters — AVROTROS, NCRV, RNW. But the documentation lacks precision. Why these performances rather than others sleeping in the archive? The question is not raised. The Third and Fourth are advertised as remastered, and we are told neither who did the work nor what was done.

What is missing above all are the words. No sung texts, no translations, in a set that contains Das Lied von der Erde and the Eighth. The seasoned Mahlerian does not need them, that is not the point: a luxury edition proclaiming its own uniqueness ought to give the listener something to follow what he is hearing. Down to the box itself, flimsy, which spills its contents at the slightest mishandling. For an undertaking of this rank, it disappoints.

Conclusion

Nobody will question the orchestral quality, the musical quality, but we cannot help being disappointed. This collection does not keep its promise. We are far from the crowning achievement. This box gives us only an intermittent greatness, which regrettable editorial choices hamper.

But there is, fortunately, plenty to be glad of across these fifteen discs. Two summits, superlative orchestral playing, the sense of a history and even of a bequest. The faithful and the admirer of the Concertgebouw will certainly get their money’s worth. But for an ideal Mahler cycle, if such a thing is even possible, one will have to turn to other cycles, more taut, more risk-taking, but perhaps also more alive and — let us dare the word — more Mahlerian.

Our Verdict

Interpretation: ★★★½☆ – Two indispensable summits, Haitink’s Das Lied von der Erde and Chailly’s Tenth. But other performances more placid, lacking in edge.

Sound Quality: ★★★½☆ – Uneven by definition, between the monos of 1939 and 1957, which distort early. Fortunately, the recent recordings are impeccable.

Booklet & edition: ★★☆☆☆ – This is where the shoe pinches. The essay is there, the dates too, but no words, no translations, and nothing on the transfers. The undertaking disappoints.

Place in the Discography: ★★★☆☆ – A box the Amsterdam faithful will want to own, the document of a tradition now vanished; but a cycle too uneven, ill served by an unfinished editorial project.

Overall Rating: 3 / 5 – A century of Mahlerian tradition, served by an edition that does not do it justice.

Read also: Schoenberg and Mahler at the Concertgebouw with Klaus Mäkelä · Mahler’s Seventh – Daniel Harding and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra · Mahler’s Third in Lucerne – Paavo Järvi and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra