Search - Mahler, Ludwig, Bernstein :: Das Lied Von Der Erde

Bernstein had no luck with Das Lied

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 09/24/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"If you are interested only in the conducting, Bernstein's conception here is magnificent, nowhere near as over-dramatized as on his Decca recording with the Vienna Phil. that recording was melodramatic in its underlining and overstatment of almost every phrase. clearly LB wanted to make a big statement, and so did Decca's engineers with their Sixties fondness for in-your-face detail and impact. Bernstein was going through his fischer-Dieskau phase, also, and wanted to showcase him in the baritone version of Das Lied.

Things are consierably scaled back here, and in the far more common version with mezzo or alto, Bernstein called upon Christa Ludwig, with whom he also had a (musical) love affair in the late Sixties and early seventies during his Viennese honeymoon after leaving the New York Phil. Ludwig made great recordings of Das Lied with Klemperer and Karajan; along with Janet Baker she was the work's leading exponent for her generation. But despite Ludwig's assured, almost peerless singing, this CD is let down by Kollo, who shouts his way through the tenor part without grace or lyricism, and especially by the scrappy-sounding Israel Phil., who simply couldn't play the music well enough to compete on the international level. But Bernstein had a special relationship with the orchestra and was committed to furthering their career on disc. That's admirable, but we listeners must regret that Bernstein would never record this great work again. Perhaps there's a DVD somewhere with a good osundtrack."