Pierre Boulez: Mahler No. 7

The most elusive of Mahler's symphonies, his Seventh, has always been one of my favorites -- in the same way the intricate network of ironies in Shakespeare's "dark comedies" (Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida) may speak to our age more directly in their teasing instability than does the tragic irony of his great heroic plays. I got to know the Seventh from Otto Klemperer's stunning 1968 recording (EMI) -- one that's usually ignored or dismissed with perfunctory comments about how slow it is (Klemperer's opening Adagio/Allegro clocks in at 27 minutes, seven minutes longer than recordings by such noted Mahlerians as Hermann Scherchen and Jascha Horenstein). But he gives us an object lesson in how relative the idea of tempo is. Spacious (both in timing and texture) rather than pious, crystalline, expansive rather than weighted down, passionate, and rhythmically alert and alive at every moment, the performance never feels slow. Instead, it captures Mahler's idea of breaking up the resources of a vast orchestra to make chamber music.

Mahler may never have imagined his Seventh Symphony at such slow tempos, but his disciple perfectly conveys its slippery tone: its marching ghosts and spidery dances, its pastoral longings (those nostalgic cowbells, which are so important in Mahler's Sixth Symphony) and equal delight in urban nightlife, its two sophisticated yet creepy "night-music" serenades (the second, "Andante amoroso," complete with guitar and mandolin), which surround an eerie scherzo marked "shadowy" (like Ravel's La valse but Viennese from the inside). War and memory and desire, deep sadness and the celebration of life's pleasures are here bound together in one inextricable web.

Two years ago Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic finally got around to the Seventh in their long-range Mahler cycle -- a powerful open-ended performance more exploratory than definitive. Simon Rattle, leading the BSO in 1991, proved that a conductor who "got" it, who found the intricately mixed message at the center, could reveal -- and revel in -- its disjunctions and catch the comic -- even mocking -- shifts between the sinister and the romantic that represent this symphony's fundamental cohesiveness (something neither Seiji Ozawa nor Bernard Haitink could do in the previous BSO performances).

And now we have an extraordinary seductive recording by Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) that does everything. It both races and lingers, confronts and teases, tickles and terrifies. It's so elegantly played, with such eloquent phrasing and insistent rhythmic elan, it's irresistible even before you raise the bigger questions. The three delicious and mysterious middle movements capture what Mahler called "the fantastic chiaroscuro" of a spectral nocturnal landscape (what he once said he'd admired in Rembrandt's famous Night Watch -- before it was cleaned, of course). Boulez offers Klemperer's spaciousness within the bounds of more traditional tempos (his two Nachtmusiks are two-thirds the length of Klemperer's). Because of their common sensitivity, these two conductors, so divergent in their approaches, are still conducting the same symphony.

In the Rondo-Finale, though, Boulez radically departs from Klemperer's imposing nobility, or Bernstein's Richard Strauss-ian high-caloric bloat. Critics of Mahler's most maligned single movement find the thematic material thin and the happy ending forced. Yet I've always loved it. The repeated fanfares sound to me like the bustle of opening-night traffic on the Ringstrasse outside the Vienna Opera. Mahler alludes to at least two kinds of comedy: the Overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger celebrates German artistry and culture; the tingling "Turkish" music of Mozart's first comic masterpiece, The Abduction from the Seraglio, displays simpler high spirits. Some people hear the Merry Widow Waltz (I hear a tune that anticipates "Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead"). And Mahler's delicate polyphony, in its high-wire balance of playfulness and "learning," obviously finds a sympathetic ear in Boulez. Mahler doesn't end by reaching for the stars. The final checkered C-major ebullience is the apotheosis of what came before -- not merely willed but a wholehearted embracing of life in this world, a "mingled yarn" (All's Well That Ends Well) of infinitely variegated colors -- and shades.

-- Lloyd Schwartz