The initial reviews of this final installment in David Zinman’s Mahler cycle with the Tonhalle Orchestra haven’t exactly been effusive, but they are wrong. From that hypnotic opening oboe melody through to the heartbreaking final bars, this is a reading of Mahler’s last-will-and-testament in vocal music whose understatement should never be misinterpreted as lack of engagement. 

True, it doesn’t have the overt gnashing of teeth and beating of breast that Bernstein brings to it in his Desert Island classic, but it has something almost as good – a stillness and a poise suggestive of a composer on his way to the other side, delaying and delaying the inevitable, almost as if trying to change the subject. 

And when the big tuttis are required, as they are for the first time in the second song (Der Einsame im Herbst), there’s plenty in reserve, both vocally with Susan Graham whose restraint up to that point is exemplary, and with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra who are surely now approaching the top echelons in European music-making.

If there are quibbles to be had, they probably lie in the third song (Von der Jugend) where tenor Christian Elsner interprets the text’s pin-point specific imagery of lost youth with such jolly good spirits that it seems like he’s accidentally stepped onto the set of the wrong movie wearing a boy-scout uniform. And then there he is again at the beginning of the fifth (Der Trunkene im Frühling), not so much recalling the drunken man in Spring as trying to impersonate him, unnecessarily.

But of course Das Lied von der Erde is all about the finale, Der Abschied, as Mahler depicts the sun setting behind the mountains in music of weep-worthy emotional power. And with Zinman bringing everything back into alignment with those stirring bass rumbles and oboe flourishes at the beginning, you just know that the next half hour is going to deliver something special. Beautiful playing from the orchestra and Graham returning to her glorious sotto voce, mean it’s time to turn out the lights as you listen, and encounter musical time standing still.

The intriguing coupling with Busoni’s Berceuse Élégiaque is brilliant, as it happens to have been one of the last works Mahler himself conducted in New York. Like Der Abschied it starts rumbling low down in the bass and is filled with a brooding sense of loss – making it a perfect conclusion to an album where Zinman and Graham truly capture the precious final glimpses of a dying man. Martin Buzacott

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