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The Sunday Times, June 2010
****

According to Theodor Adorno, Mahler’s last complete symphony was “the first work of new music”; Bruno Walter, the conductor of its premiere performance more than a year after Mahler’s death, took a conservative view of this valedictory music as the summation of the Romantic symphony. Both standpoints are valid, and it is hardly surprising that Salonen emphasizes the prophetic rather than the nostalgic. He is electrifying in the grotesque rondo-burlesque scherzo, in which Mahler teeters on the precipice of atonality. As Mahler instructs, Salonen’s landler plays up the coarseness and crudity of the folk-inspired music. In the two massive slow outer movements, he doesn’t wring out the final drops of emotion, but empathises with the love of life and the beauties of nature that paradoxically emerge from Mahler’s premonition of death.

Hugh Canning

BBC Music Magazine, August 2010
Performance ****, Recording *****

Take this first of all as a convalescent's hymn of thanksgiving after the confinement of Norrington's snatch-and-grab Mahler Nine (which some have admired more than I). Salonen surely does nearly everything that most of us require from a cutting-edge interpreter with plenty to say. His Boulezian ear for balance keeps all the textures phantasmagorically clear in the first and third movements, with a little more warmth than he used to have and an Abbado-ian way of pushing forward without seeming to rush. The Philharmonia brass, open as well as stopped or muted do heroic work throughout, and Salonen's alertness to the right sonority gives us some moments of supernatural beauty - the misty horn ensemble in the first-movement coda, for instance, or the ethereal trumpeter who dusts off the hurly-burly at the heart of the Rondo-Burleske.

To compare the Philharmonia with the very best, I might add that the strings can be a little soft-grained in climaxes, and at the other end of the scale not quite as inward or soulful as, say, Abbado's Berlin Philharmonic; even so, the final dying embers are a dream, surely made possible by live circumstances. After the first-movement punches, the scherzo comes across as less than clumsy and lurid (though the last of the delirious whirls does take off). There are compensating insights, though, and no one makes the Festival Hall acoustics sound finer than engineer Jonathan Stokes.

David Nice

Gavin Plumley, http://entartetemusik.blogspot.com, 22nd June 2010

The Philharmonia's Vienna: City of Dreams series was an august start to Esa-Pekka Salonen's time with the orchestra. Programming Zemlinsky, Berg and Schoenberg with a backbone of Mahler symphonies, Salonen explored the proto-modernist flavours of this music. He brought clarified readings to the works, which for me often avoided the dangers in the score and left their post-romantic credentials on the shelf. The performance of Zemlinsky's Lyrische Symphonie was biting and direct, while the concert version of Wozzeck I found puzzlingly unmoving.

After an issue of Gurrelieder last year, Signum Records has now released Salonen's Mahler 9; in these anniversary years, the already groaning shelf of new Mahler recordings is clearly going to expand at a rapid rate. After the forced polemic of Norrington's version, Salonen's even-handed approach - neither blousy nor astringent -makes for a welcome change. The first movement unfolds at around Bruno Walter's speed, rather than the slower readings of Chailly or Bernstein. But unlike Walter, Salonen steals his on thunder at the various climaxes of the movement and it is an oddly oblique performance.

The central movements reveal the proto-modernist and the Mahlerian irony which Salonen clearly relishes. Brusque but precise work from the entire orchestra (though with irritatingly sluggish percussion at times - is that a sound issue) makes for a dazzling display. None of the music's excesses are emphasised, but Salonen clearly feels that the work is eloquent enough in its own right. In the caustic central dance and march movement, I tend to agree. The reading comes unstuck in the final movement. Rather than aiming for Haitink's lofty planes, with that numinous control of the dialogue between the instruments we heard last year at the Proms, Salonen again aims for Walter-esque speeds, but without the gruelling Götterdämmerung credentials. It's frustratingly unemotional. Yes, this may be the first new music, but it needs to keep one foot in its Romantic past.

Julian Johnson, artistic advisor for the City of Dreams series, describes the many elements of Mahler's armoury in his excellent book Mahler's Voices. To nail the irony is to get only one major facet of the composer's multivarious idiom. One element wrestles with the other and, for me, Salonen's clean approach misses that emotional heart in the work. Salonen describes the process of recording: This is about death and there must be a sense of no return. It’s your only shot. You just do it and live with the results. This is real life and death, not a video game. The recording, however, sounds safe and comfortable; a poleaxing performance of the final movement has to summon up more brinksmanship than Salonen does with his nevertheless superb band.

International Record Review, July/August 2010

No painstaking, hyper-emotional lingering for Esa-Pekka Salonen: he propels this symphony with a single-minded, urgent zest for life, allowing the intrusions of death to register their greatest impact when relevant to the music, rather than casting their shadow over the entire work. By doing so, its radical and forward-looking qualities emerge with the clarity and vision of a conductor renowned as a composer in his own right and whose expertise in contemporary music elucidates texture and orchestral detail with more convincing insight for genuine Mahlerian style than Norrington's recent makeover from Stuttgart.

Salonen does not come without issues, however. At the central climax of the first movement, instead of a single fortissimo tam-tam stroke, a sustained roll obliterates everything for two-and-a-half bars. As far as I can identify, the only time Mahler wrote a tam-tam roll was in the huge percussion crescendo that introduces the march of the dead in the finale of the Second Symphony, where he specifically notates the technique using a trill. The effect here is a curiosity at the crux of the movement and one that doesn't bear much repetition.

Less controversial, but also rather surprising in a performance where the composer's tricky contrasting tempo directions are so closely observed, is the haunting transition after the oasis of calm in the Rondo-Burleske. Mahler asks for no increase in tempo until the sudden recapitulation of the opening material, but Salonen speeds up rapidly through this section, sapping its mystery and depriving the abruptness of the moment of much of its shock value.

There are also some small but troubling inconsistencies in sound quality. With violins grouped together, in overall balance the firsts sound like the poor relation, but at two points, the upper string sound recedes into a strange pallid acoustic that perhaps betrays a patch-in. Unfortunately, these are both at points where Mahler asks for full weight of tone – the first being the seething Leidenschaftlich passage almost midway through the first movement, the second just five bars into the final Adagio. This lasts for only a few bars in both instances but, again, could prove wearisome on repeated listening.

Last on the slate are the cymbals in the finale. They are clashed only twice; fortissimo and with the direction klingen lassen at the full orchestral climax and again a few bars later with a Single sforzando marking. Frustratingly, with another distracting change in perspective, the recording relays the dynamics the other way round, with a distant non-event followed by an all-too-present ear-splitter.

It is unfortunate that all these oddities arise at such key moments. If they can be lived with, Salonen delivers a compelling performance. Tempos are consistently mobile, especially in the finale, where by saving a true adagissimo just for the final page, a note of questing rather than maudlin nobility prevails for the majority of the movement. Added poignancy is thereby brought to the increasingly fragmented melodic and harmonic references at the close, framing the work in a context of extinction that refers directly back to its opening birth pangs. The extraordinary emotional intensity of Abbado or Karajan, both with the BPO, may not be matched but it remains a persuasive traversal full of temperament, acuity and apposite contrasts of mood.

Tan Julier

Classic FM Magazine, September 2010
****

[Taken from a comparative view]

… Esa-Pekka Salonen is an apt point of comparison: his background as a composer and New Music conductor is far removed from Norrington's. No one claims Salonen is a transformational, revelatory Mahler conductor. But after suffering Norrington, his big-hearted shaping of the music and imaginative fiare is a balm. Mahler, too, was a composer/conductor motivated by the contemporary relevance of his art: which performance do you think he'd have preferred?

Philip Clark

MusicWeb International, January 2011

Esa-Pekka Salonen became the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor in September 2008. In his first season with the orchestra he devised an ambitious exploration of the music and culture of Vienna between 1900 and 1935 under the title City of Dreams. Though I can’t see it stated explicitly in the booklet, I imagine that the concert at which this recording was made took place as part of that nine-month-long festival.

Salonen has impressive credentials as a conductor of the music of that period – and not just Viennese music – and, indeed, he really made his mark as a conductor back in 1983 when he stepped in at very short notice to conduct the Philharmonia in Mahler’s Third Symphony. The Ninth is a very different proposition from the huge, all-embracing Third and I was very interested to hear how Salonen would approach it.

I have some twenty recordings of this magnificent symphony in my collection and this is different to all of them in what I think I should call its lightness of touch. I should say straightaway that those who want this symphony to sound angst-ridden should probably look elsewhere. Salonen has a very different perspective on the work. In the booklet there’s a quote from Alban Berg, who had this to say. ‘The first movement is the most glorious he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, for Nature; the longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one’s being, before death comes, as inevitably it does.’ In the hands of many interpreters much of this ambitious, searching creation is an anguished outburst, though, of course, it has more tranquil stretches too. Salonen adopts a fairly flowing tempo at the start and in the first few minutes he brings out a gentle lyricism in the music. He also cultivates a transparency of texture that permeates much of the performance as a whole.

All this is well and good but as the movement progresses and we come to some of the more emotionally charged passages I began to feel a lack of grit in the interpretation. In some ways it’s a refreshing change not to hear the music delivered – or, by some conductors, over-delivered - with white-hot emotion but, well thoughthe Philharmonia plays, I missed the requisite degree of bite in the playing. I suppose the clinching thought for me as the movement drew to a close was that it had lacked the appropriate intensity. I don’t want hysteria in Mahler but here, though there was much to admire, I felt somewhat short-changed emotionally.

The author of the booklet note, Julian Johnson, has a wonderful phrase for the opening pages of the ländler, which he describes as a “rustic cartoon.” But Salonen’s rather cultured way with the music doesn’t really bring out any exaggerated, humorous element in the music; it’s rather polite. His tempi are often fleet and often I felt a lack of bite – that word again! – and weight.

Should not the Rondo-Burleske snarl? I think it should and I’m afraid it doesn’t here. The playing is precise and, despite the often-teeming detail on the orchestral canvass Salonen achieves an admirable clarity of texture. But I missed what Julian Johnson aptly refers to as the “sense of distortion and exaggeration”. The slower nostalgic, trumpet-led episodes are beautifully played but, because what has gone before hasn’t been as intense as one is used to hearing, Salonen doesn’t achieve sufficient contrast when he gets to these nostalgic pages. From 10:20 the final whirlwind appearance of the rondo material has more bite but even so it lacks the venom that many other conductors have found in these pages.

It is in the final great adagio that Salonen’s cultivated approach pays dividends. I hear a nobility in his reading – though perhaps not as much nobility as there is in Giulini’s Chicago recording for DG – and he could not be accused of wearing his heart on his sleeve. The extended climax, from 13:10, is powerful though I have heard more intensity from others in these pages. The end of the movement, from 17:41 – and especially after 19:30 – brings calm acceptance and the playing here is very beautiful and controlled. Gradually the music dies away on ever- diminishing threads of sound and, even through headphones, the sound at the very end is on the edge of audibility. That’s most impressive in a live concert performance. Signum include a lengthy period of silence after the music has died away and, rightly on this occasion, there is no disturbing applause. Salonen offers an interesting perspective on the symphony, though it’s far from a complete view, I’d suggest. Whilst I may return to it once in a while for its different approach I think that the likes of Barbirolli, Bernstein and Rattle (his Berlin recording) to name the conductors of but three rival versions, deliver far more and a much more rounded picture of this unsettling and profoundly moving symphony. The recorded sound is good.

John Quinn