★★★☆☆ The playing and sound are great, but Jansons breezes over the surface

Mahler: Symphony No 6

Mahler's Sixth Symphony is a work of such intensity and tragedy that it's tempting to dilute the darkness. I think the interpreter needs to find the delicate balance of maintaining the drama while providing enough flexibility to prevent the listener from wallowing in unrelenting seriousness. In today's interpretive world, it's stylish to neglect much of the passion in favor of greater articulation and accuracy.

To a degree, it's easy to understand this trend. In the present recording, Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw play with aplomb and precision. It sounds quite light to me, though. The texture is carefully manicured, smoothing over the snarling bass lines and jagged edges. But it all sounds impersonal to me, lacking the true meaning of the music. In trying to make the music more listenable, Jansons has stolen the novelty. Ultimately, this music relies on emotion, not on the quality of execution. And while I find the sonority of the orchestra impressive, it all seems too polite. And frankly, there are plenty of competing recordings from super-virtuoso orchestras. Abbado released his own interpretation with the Berliners a year before this one, and the virtuosity is considerably more impressive, plus we hear riveting conducting full of conviction. And within a few years of this release, we were gifted with thrilling readings from Gergiev and Pappano. There simply isn't anything to attract me to this recording, as flawlessly as the orchestra plays. The recorded sound is quite good, if that makes a difference.

I'm not familiar with Henze's Sebastian im Traum, but it's played with great clarity by the orchestra. If you're willing to enter the modernist idiom, I see no reason for this recording to let you down. But the Mahler is a miss. Strange, because Jansons had released a similar airy 6th with the LSO a few years before that suffered from the same drawbacks.