F. Reiner, Chicago S.O., Lisa Della Casa - Mahler: Symphony No. 4 (2005) [SACD]

This is in my opinion one of the VERY BEST Living Stereos so far! And we have already had quite a few good ones.
I find both the interpretation by Reiner,the playing by the CSO & the recording by Lewis Layton, absolutely outstanding!
Reiner lets us hear exactly what Mahler wrote no more, no less.
I don’t find that boring at all !
On the contrary, “Ich geniesse die himmlichen Freuden” when listening to this the sunniest of Mahler’s symphonies in such a perfect interpretation.
I also hope Reiner’s equally perfect Das Lied von der Erde will be in the next batch from Living Stereo.
Once again Living Stereo makes me really wonder what progress, if any, has been made since 1958 when this recording was made.
Everything basically sounds as fresh, clear & natural as almost only live performances can.
The simple miking has rendered the soundpicture & perspectives more realistically than most, modern multimiked recordings ever have.
However superficially impressive the latest Telarcs & others may initially sound, on repeated hearings there almost always creeps in that feeling of “cut & paste,” of too many mikes, of balances not at all the way you would hear them in a live concert.
There is NONE of that here.
Everybody, including the solist, is heard performing in a believable acoustic!
The critisism where I think Mr “P-Bucket” might have a valid a point is possibly regarding the soloist’s singing. Both Edith Mathis under Karajan & von Stade under Abbado sound more angelic.
But neither of them has been recorded as naturally as Lisa Della Casa, who for once sounds realistic in size & timbre.
And she is thank God (Lewis Layton) not catapulted 20 yards in front of the orchestra as is the case in virtually all other recordings since the advent of multimiking!
I have in the past couple of weeks been to quite a few live concerts in Estonia & Stockholm during the Baltic Sea Festival, where I heard live, both the Marinsky under Gergiev the Swedish Radio symphony orchestra under Esa Pekka Salonen.
After such an intense live experience it is always a bit difficult to go back to “canned food”.
But of the recordings I have listened to since Saturday’s live Kullervo in Stockholm, this Mahler’s 4th is one of few that sounds reasonably much like the real thing.
It isn’t perfect, there are some slight signs of tape overload in the 2nd movement. Strings, although mostly velvety & sweet, sound a wee bit forced a couple of times. There is still a long way to go to recreate the huge dynamics & true sonorities of a big symphony orchestra.
But strangely enough this old analogue recording does a better job than most modern ones do.
Compared to denser works like the 6th & 9th this wonderfully “lightweight” symphony by Mahler standards, certainly is easily digestable fare with its naive take on life after death.