Mahler: Symphony No. 4 - Judith Raskin; The Cleveland Orchestra; George Szell

Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com
On this disc you have a classic Mahler recordings–Szell's Cleveland account of the fourth symphony from 1965. The Cleveland Orchestra has always had a reputation for phenomenal accuracy and brilliance, and Szell harnesses these qualities to give an almost supernaturally clear account of Mahler's score. Details of lower-string phrasing, thrown-away woodwind chirrups, and muted trumpets supporting a melody are given just the right amount of emphasis to make the surface texture sparkle with life. But, more important, Szell also captures the overall mood of ironic playfulness, while heeding Mahler's own direction with regard to the childlike last movement–"without parody." --Warwick Thompson
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George Szell's reputation as a ruthless orchestral technician makes it hard to imagine him succeeding with such a tender and deeply affecting work as Mahler's Fourth Symphony, but in fact he confounded all my anticipatory doubts and fears. This is a superb issue of the symphony, on a par with the HMV/Kletzki (which is, incidentally, only half the price), and superior, in my opinion, to Columbia's own Klemperer issue. As I have said before, I find Klemperer's interpretation not quite up to his great concert performances of this work, owing to over-deliberate tempi in the first two movements; and the sophisticated Schwarzkopf is not ideally cast in the childlike music of the finale.
Szell shows the utmost sensitivity to every facet of the music, with a masterly use of rubato and dynamic gradation throughout; his interpretation is backed by some flawless playing by the Cleveland Orchestra, and some genuinely childlike singing from Judith Raskin; and the stereo recording has for the most part the same successful close balance as the HMV, picking up every strand of the music, with an extra brilliance of sound and a beautifully judged change of atmosphere in the finale. Szell is on the whole extremely faithful to Mahler's markings, notably in his really deliberate tempo for the ambling woodwind theme of the first movement (fig. 4) and in his preservation of the slowed-down tempo after the D major passage in the scherzo (around fig. 15) – two markings which most conductors find too dangerous to attempt. His main tempo for the scherzo is perhaps a shade fast for Mahier's indication "Moving comfortably, without haste", but it enables him to penetrate to the underlying nightmarish character of this superficially genial movement in a way I have never heard before. The slow movement is beautifully done, and the finale again, like the scherzo, is something quite special. If the main tempo is perhaps a shade on the slow side this time, the atmosphere is perfect: Judith Raskin sings with real delicacy, the orchestral accompaniment (as Mahler indicated) is kept as discreet as possible, and a rather more distant balance is used – with the overall result that the finale takes its into a completely different world, as it should, but rarely does. Moreover – a small but important point which is nearly always overlooked in performances and recordings of this work – the finale follows almost immediately after the hushed dominant preparation which ends the slow movement, a procedure which Mahler admittedly did not specify, but surely only because he took it for granted. My only criticisms of the issue are that occasionally, in Szell's handling of the tricky rubato problems (fig. 7 in the first movement, for example), the orchestral technician in his character suddenly takes over from the spontaneous interpreter, and that the brilliance of the recording gets a little fierce here and there, with certain solo features (especially the solo violin's high pizzicato in the scherzo) pushed into unnerving proximity. Deryck Cooke; The Gramophone