Gelebte Musik

Kurt Sanderling’s three late Mahler recordings represent an outstanding testament to a first-class artist. They are decidedly “Germanic:” sober, serious, never theatrical or gratuitously showy, but this does not mean that they are not powerfully expressive or exciting. They are uniformly excellently played by the Berlin Symphony. The climax of the Ninth’s first movement, for example, is thrilling, and while Sanderling doesn’t race through the Rondo: Burleske as many other do, he captures the music’s bite and bitterness very well indeed–rather like Klemperer or Ancerl than Solti or Bernstein. The finale too isn’t dragged out to the last possible moment: the music sings with unsentimental clarity. The same observations also characterize this superb rendition of the Deryck Cooke version of the Tenth Symphony. Sanderling prepared what is essentially his own edition, using Cooke as a basis, restoring some of the more heavily scored passages, adding extra percussion (very effectively), an