MAHLER'S TENTH: MUSIC FOR THE AGES

The crux of this unbelievably dense symphony -- it's the musical equivalent of what you'd get if Dante had written The Brothers Karamazov -- is the tiny (four minutes) central movement, which Mahler marked "Purgatorio or Inferno," later striking out "or Inferno." A sinking D-minor theme in the midsection is marked "Tod! Verk.!" -- the latter possibly meaning "Verkündigung" and alluding to the Annunciation of Death motif from act two of Die Walküre, when Brünnhilde tells Siegmund he must die. It's from the dead of D minor that the symphony attempts to rise back into its home key of F-sharp major.

The opening movement has two main themes: a yearning-for-paradise adagio in F-sharp major that soars to dizzy heights, and a wandering pilgrim of an andante, mostly in F-sharp minor, that keeps cutting the adagio off (much like the bassoon procession in the last movement of Mahler's Ninth). After some 15 minutes, their faltering dialogue is terminated by an organ-like Apocalypse chorale (the one with which Ken Russell opened his mind-boggling 1974 film Mahler) in A-flat minor that leads into a cacophonous nine-note dissonance against an ear-splitting high A on the trumpets. It's left for the two themes, now hand in hand, to limp tenderly home; the coda closes with the adagio yearning theme turned upside down.

All seems resolved in the F-sharp-minor scherzo, which bounces exuberantly from 3/2 to 2/2 to 5/4 to 3/4, changing time signature almost every measure (the opening horn figure has been likened to a hen's cackle, and indeed there's a rooster-ish quality to this section) before settling into a more graceful trio in F and then an E-flat Ländler based on the adagio yearning theme; ingenious combinations of these three subjects lead to a nostalgic melody drawn from the opening horn cackle that prefigures The Music Man's "Lida Rose" before the movement races to its raucous, triumphant conclusion. But the Purgatorio, with its ostinato bass figure that recalls Mahler's song "Das irdische Leben" (in which a child starves before its mother can bring it bread), flits by like shades from Dante's lower depths, pale and ghostly, never rising out of the despair of its D-minor middle section (over one horrific climax Mahler wrote "Erbarme," echoing Amfortas's cry in Parsifal, and then "O God! O God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"). The E-minor scherzo that follows wears motifs from the Purgatorio as if they were chains. A demonic howl of protest recalls the "Trinklied" of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (in measures 184-191 he even quotes the line where a full goblet of wine is deemed more precious than all the earth's riches); the sentimental trio waltzes turn melancholy and then rotten as the movement's attempt to move through B major to F sharp collapses and it instead plummets through A minor into, again, D minor. By the end it's been stripped of all flesh: the coda is a dance for skeletons played by the percussion and ending in a muffled crack on a military drum (inspired by a fireman's funeral cortege that Mahler witnessed in New York).

The Finale finds us in a murky hell out of which figures from the Purgatorio attempt to climb, but they're cut off by repeated thwacks from the muffled drum. Eventually a nightingale-like flute melody breaks free, followed by a paradisial violin cantilena that's heading for F-sharp until the muffled drum and tenebral Purgatorio motifs intervene and drive it back into D minor. The main section ensues, an allegro totentanz of Purgatorio themes culminating in the nine-note holocaust from the first movement, with the last trumpet being coaxed down off its high A only by the reappearance of the symphony's opening wandering theme. This unlocks the gates, with the chastened violin cantilena pointing the way to F-sharp and the nightingale flute melody (which, significantly, incorporates the Purgatorio's sinking theme) bringing Mahler home. Paradise, perhaps, but certainly peace.

The new RCA release comes with an invaluable bonus CD in which Leonard Slatkin conducts parallel passages from the versions by Joe Wheeler and Clinton Carpenter (neither of which has been recorded) as well as those by Cooke and Mazzetti. Slatkin is lucid and authoritative; too bad RCA allowed him only 19 minutes. Mazzetti's realization begins from the premise that Cooke was too conservative in filling in Mahler's textures, but what he adds doesn't always sound like Mahler. The cymbal clashes and drumrolls call up Richard Strauss, or Sousa; especially egregious is the battery of percussion "highlighting" the strings' last wistful upward surge, just five bars from the end. The additional counterpoint ranges from intriguing to vulgar; even at its most Mahlerian, it conjures the composer's middle symphonies, not the lean homophony of his later years.

The finale in particular propounds some puzzling decisions. Mazzetti's opening double basses sound wimpy next to the Fafner-like growl of Cooke's bass tuba. The flute melody is obscured by meretricious oboe and string counterpoint, and then the little Purgatorio-motif chorale at measures 53-54 is given to the oboes when it should logically go to the flutes (since the flute melody began the redemption process). When the violin cantilena reappears after the cataclysm (bar 303), Cooke's horns give it a noble glow; Mazzetti's strings just sound redundant. The list goes on: horn counterpoint at bar 327 that intrudes on the glory of the second violins; horn instead of the more delicate cor anglais at bar 334; harp where a cutting trumpet was called for at bars 347 and 348. Perhaps my ears need more time to adjust to Mazzetti's ideas, but a weekend of continuous listening to this disc has left me convinced that Cooke was the right channel for Mahler's genius.

Slatkin's conducting likewise lacks finesse. It's clear from the bonus disc that he gave this symphony the serious study it deserves; he even splits his first and second violins (this was Mahler's practice and it should be every Mahler conductor's). But there's no heaven and no hell here, just a day in the life. From the first movement's cataclysm he moves matter-of-factly into the gigantic coda, as if nothing unusual had occurred. At bar 494 of the E-minor scherzo he introduces a big, un-Mahlerian ritard and then slams on the brakes before continuing. In the finale he ambles through the introduction with no apparent sense of what's at stake, then introduces a splashy, self-conscious climax at bar 72, when the violin cantilena is cut off. Here too the cataclysm saunters past, and Slatkin's square phrasing makes the return of the wandering theme at bar 284 sound perfunctory instead of eschatological.

All the same, you need this disc; even its shortcomings (and there are good things here as well) are massively revealing about Mahler's masterpiece. But you should also have a Cooke version (Chailly if you can afford it, otherwise Sanderling or Rattle; see below), and by all means you should hear Rattle at Symphony Hall this weekend. The best of the century doesn't come around every day.

-- Jeffrey Gantz

So far there have been just eight recordings of the Mahler Tenth. The finest, by Wyn Morris, is the only one currently unavailable:

* Eugene Ormandy, Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Columbia 1965)
* Wyn Morris, New Philharmonia (Philips, 1973)
* Kurt Sanderling, Berlin Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Schallplatten, 1979)
* James Levine, Philadelphia Orchestra (RCA, 1978-1980; 2 CDs)
* Simon Rattle, Bournemouth Symphony (EMI, 1980)
* Riccardo Chailly, Berlin Radio Symphony (Decca, 1986; 2 CDs)
* Eliahu Inbal, Frankfurt Radio Symphony (Denon, 1992)
* Leonard Slatkin, St. Louis Symphony (RCA, 1995)