... and there's a ridiculous glissando near the beginning of the Scherzo of the 7th which doesn't even vaguely approximate to anything in my score, so I guess that's another of Mike G's Veränderungen. Which seem to be the price one has to pay for what's otherwise the most finely-detailed Mahler I've ever heard. Now spinning: first movement of the 3rd, to check impressions formed yesterday. I notice that Gielen also has the posthorn solo in the third movement played by a posthorn, which is pretty unusual - the player does the long trill with lips rather than valve too, which adds to the atmosphere (since it should be what Stockhausen would call a "window" into another musical world rather than a showpiece for beauty and consistency of tone). The Minuet is taken a bit too fast for the SWR violins to play some of their more ornate moments cleanly together but the rest of the symphony goes superbly I think.

That's exactly the one I mean! To my shame I hadn't seen that there are two systems on that page. Doh!

Yes, well in that case I have to reverse my previous comment and say that Gielen is the only conductor I've heard who has the clarinettist actually play what's written.

Maybe Norrington has such a bad sense of pitch and in consequence any slight vibtrato would confuse him?  Or maybe he just likes a dried up old sound as he is a dried up old stick?

My guess would be it's the lack of vibrato.

(I've not heard Norrington's Mahler myself, being caught in a black hole whereby I am not enough of a Mahler fan to collect multiple recordings of things, but enough of one to know that the set I do have -- Bernstein/NYPO on Sony -- isn't really what I'm looking for.  I do have my eye on that Maderna 9th...)

Yes, but some people find the lack of vibrato attractive and others don't; also for some people, whether it's "authentic" or not matters and to others the question of authenticity in Mahler performance is relatively a non-issue.

There are after all recordings made of Mahler's music by conductors who had direct access to the composer, and these are different enough from one another to suggest that the idea of there being one best way to interpret the music is a mistaken one. Plus there's the fact that Mahler himself tinkered with his scores regularly, and the comment to Mengelberg cited by Bryn, so which posthumous Veränderungen might conceivably have been sanctioned by the composer and which not? obviously that question is impossible to answer, but is it even worth asking? Then you have Mahler's position in music history which gives rise to a school of interpretation (represented most notably by Boulez and Gielen) which concentrates on Mahler's "modernistic" qualities rather than his "late romantic" ones, and you have Norrington who seems to be trying to address that issue by recreating what he sees as a performance style Mahler himself would have been familiar with. I don't think it can be said that any of these issues is more or less "valid" in itself but I do think that one's response to them (and not only them of course) should be as unprejudiced by one's previous ideas of how things "ought" to be as possible. The opening  of the slow movement of no.4 in Norrington's recording, which Ollie has drawn attention to before, emanates a deathly calm I had never experienced in any music before whoever's performing it and for whatever reasons. One may not "like" all interpretations, but they are all implicit in the music, which in the case of Mahler is so complex and deeply-textured in its stylistic, structural, historical and psychological characteristics (to name only these) that no single performance, no sigle "depth of focus", can show the whole picture, nor should it try to. This is one of the main things that keeps me coming back to it: this multiplicity of interpretative "pathways" both for performers and listeners.

There are other criticisms that are/have been made about Norrington, to do with the emotional reticence and detachment of the performances (not untypical of British conductors, though), the all-purpose rejection of deeper and richer sonorities as a matter of ideology, the highly calculated nature of the renditions and lack of spontaneity, and so on and so forth. These tie in with the Taruskin charge that under the auspices of trying to present something supposedly 'historical', actually the music is being reinvented in the style of neo-classical Stravinsky. Not saying I wholly agree with that charge, but it doesn't come from nowhere. Some conductors could do some of the same repertoire with little or no vibrato, but the results would be wholly different.

In terms of the 'authenticity' of the performances, there is some sense in which the implicit claims made in that respect (and the previous post refers to what Norrington 'sees as a performance style Mahler himself would have been familiar with') add an aura of importance over and above whatever a listener might personally prefer. If what Norrington does was merely seen as one interpretation amongst many, perceptions would be different, I believe. It's in this light that the claims to historical verisimilitude (which can apply to various aspects of performance, not just matters of 'style') can quite reasonably be questioned.

As far as Norrington goes, Don't Forget That There are two sides to pretty well any interesting interpretation - the parts and the whole. I wouldn't be inclined to sign up to all of Norrington's interpretations as global entities; from what I've heard about his concert performances I might not even like them. For me it's enough, though, that he's put one aspect of orchestral sound under the microscope in a way that no other conductor has actually bothered to do in the recent past. The results speak for themselves as far as I'm concerned: I haven't heard Mahler's harmony and counterpoint this clear from anyone else, not even Abbado or Boulez.

I would also not be inclined to be as dogmatic on the issue as Norrington is, but I suspect only someone wishing to pursue it in this way would have got the results he's got, which at best are indispensable listening.

...Abbado did put out some Mahler with the Berlin Phil while he was chief conductor; I don't know the 1st but the 5th is astonishing. The live 7th, 4th, 6th, 9th that have come out since haven't been of his very best for me.

And until you've heard the trombone solo in the first movement of the third played by the Moscow Phil trombonist (in 1961!) with a vibrato you could drive a tractor through, you haven't heard all that the work has to offer.