Lovely, soft-grained Webern, but the Mahler lacks any passio
Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 10/28/2008
(3 out of 5 stars)
"The imaginative couplings, always a Gielen specialty, are undone by readings that lack passion. Although she is smooth-voiced and assured as a singer, contralto Cornelia Kallisch cummunicates no grief at all: these could be songs of regret that a child went in for an appendectomy. Gielen's orchestral work is careful and faceless. Mahler without passion is pointless in the end, unless you fully buy into the notion that all music should be played objectively, whatever that means.
We've had too many great readings of the shattering Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Sym. to make do with a seviceably played, fairly quick, but uninvolving rendition like Gielen's -- his phrasing is devoid of nuance, his climaxes less than earthshaking. Which leaves two ealry works from Webern when he stood firmly in Mahler's world and hadn't yet invented his own. Gielen feels at home in this idiom, but his readings are fairly casual and laid back compared with Boulez's near-definitive ones."