Though it was launched without a great deal of fanfare, five years before he took over as the Bavarian Radio Symphony’s chief conductor, Simon Rattle’s Mahler series with the Munich-based orchestra was already promising to be one of the most significant additions to the composer’s discography in recent years. Rattle’s accounts of Das Lied von der Erde and the Sixth and Ninth Symphonies have already appeared, all of them taken from performances in the Isarphilharmonie im Gasteig in Munich, and the new version of the Seventh was recorded there last November.
When complete, this will be Rattle’s second Mahler survey, following his cycle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s and 90s (he went on to rerecord some of the symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker too, but not all of them). Inevitably, there are distinct differences in his approach to the Seventh across the 30-odd years that separate the Birmingham and Munich versions, as well as between this latest one and a live recording that was included in a composite box of the Mahler symphonies issued by the Berlin Philharmonic four years ago.
