Mahler, Symphony No. 5, Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska

Virtually nobody who listens carefully to Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor (1901-02) (BIS 2226) these days would doubt its greatness, unless one simply does not care for his music as a whole. Yet why do many recordings of the symphony leave me with the nagging feeling that something is not right?

One of the obvious things about the 5th is true to a greater or lesser degree of all the symphonies. They do not so much sound like Beethoven, Bruckner, or Tchaikovsky at root, of course. Even though the opening theme of the symphony at hand alludes to Beethoven's 5th. It does so in such an oblique fashion as to have a similar rhythmic element, little otherwise. So too Mahler's treatment of the strings throughout the symphony. What they do in part relates to the classical-romantic tradition of what strings can do. But Mahler conceives of them in a matrix where much of the time the winds and brass are equal partners.

Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra grasp all of this beautifully and give us a truly balanced reading of the 5th. It sounds like Mahler and nothing else, exactly. The three instrumental families blend together in perfect symmetry as the score requires, yet the tender melancholy of the Adagietto lets the strings shine in their heartfull outpouring of mixed feelings.

This is a work that exemplifies the brilliance, yet also the beginning of the twilight of fin de siecle Vienna. Culturally all is still at a peak, yet the Austro-Hungarian Empire's containment of so many social-cultural subgroupings is troublesome and of course eventually the center could not hold. What "bothered" some contemporary hearers of the 5th is the inclusion-extrusion of "impure" folk ethnic elements interspersed throughout the work, Bohemian, Viennese, Slavic, Jewish strains of an earthy sort taking their place beside more classically derived thematic material. Of course this is part of what makes Mahler Mahler. The 5th has no grand choral finale ascending to high heaven, which only served I suppose to remind sceptical listeners that what remained made them uncomfortable.

Today of course we revel in such carefully intersected contrasts, such synthetic brilliances. Osmo Vanska understands all of that and gives us a sonically full, sympathetic reading of the totality that goes into Mahler's 5th. The details are everything. Not all versions of the symphony I have heard do justice to the at first perplexing jumble or elements. It is no jumble, in the end. It is all Mahler heard and embraced around him, and it is his brilliantly personal concatenation that the Minnesota plays for us so engagingly and idiomatically.

There is joy and sadness, a hazy nostalgia and a briskly contemporary Viennese encompassing of what need not be thought of as opposites, all elements taking their essential place in the artful scheme. The Minnesota Orchestra brings us the score in all its fulsomeness, with vivid sound staging and dramatically detailed balance. It is music that must be allowed to breathe. There may be divinity in its sublimity, but it is firmly of this world. Vanska feels the totality of it and brings it to us in spectacular Mahleresque ravishment.

Here is a reading that puts together what Mahler intended, true to the tabula rasa deja vu complexities and beauty. Strongly recommended!