When Mahler died in 1911, Das Lied von der Erde was one of the two masterpieces that he left completed but unperformed. The score does suggest tenor and baritone as alternative soloists to the preferred tenor and contralto, but very few of the outstanding recordings of the work have opted for that all-male pairing; of the 20th century’s outstanding Mahler conductors only Leonard Bernstein recorded Das Lied with a baritone, the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
But it’s understandable that a Lieder baritone of Christian Gerhaher’s inquiring intelligence would also want to tackle this transcendent music, and to follow the example of Fischer-Dieskau, with whom he is so regularly compared. In fact Gerhaher did record Das Lied von der Erde in its orchestral form in 2009, with Kent Nagano conducting, but though his own contribution is exemplary, the performance as a whole is deeply disappointing.
Now Gerhaher returns to Das Lied von der Erde with the tenor Piotr Beczała, and with his usual recital partner Gerold Huber tackling a piano reduction of the full score. No one could claim that a piano can ever be a truly convincing replacement for the orchestra in this of all song cycles, and there are moments when even a player of Huber’s quality can’t avoid triteness. But the lack of the full orchestral palette does bring the voices into sharper focus.
The moments of strain in the opening Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde, even from a singer of Beczała’s power and authority, are a reminder of Mahler’s sometimes impossible demands on the tenor, even when there’s no competition from an orchestra. But Beczała’s performances of his other two songs are immaculately weighted and coloured, providing a perfect counterpoint to Gerhaher’s explorations, which lead inevitably to a wonderfully searching account of the final Abschied, in which every phrase seems to be individually imagined. Orchestral colours are missed more than ever here, but the sheer range of Gerhaher’s inflections, the way in which he treasures every word, is a treat in itself.
This week’s other pick
The latest instalment of Osmo Vänskä’s Mahler series with the Minnesota Orchestra on BIS is devoted to the other score left unheard when Mahler died, the Ninth Symphony. Yet after the superlative account of Deryck Cooke’s performing version of the Tenth Symphony that came from the same source two years ago it’s a bit of a disappointment. The Ninth is a work in which the competition on disc is particularly fierce, and though Vänskä’s performance is magnificently played and shaped with typical skill and unfaltering coherence, it never quite conjures the sense of inevitability that the great recordings, such as those conducted by Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado and Bernard Haitink, convey.
