This set is a really good deal, even if Sony’s premature discontinuation of the Bernstein Century series (since revived, but only in France) prevented assembly of a truly complete set of the great conductor’s Mahler recordings for the label. So you won’t find Das Lied von der Erde, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Lenny’s LSO Second Symphony, and some songs with piano accompaniment. However, you do get Janet Baker’s Kindertotenlieder, three Rückert songs and one Wunderhorn-Lied by Jennie Tourel, and extra versions of the first movement of the Eighth and the Adagietto of the Fifth. As for the balance, some of these newly remastered performances have been reviewed here individually, and you may want to look them up. To summarize: the interpretations of symphonies Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 rank with the finest available. No. 1 is very good, though Bernstein’s later DG recording betters it. The only dud in the set is No. 5, not a bad conception, but neither well played nor well recorded, and a pale shadow of what Bernstein later achieved with the Vienna Philharmonic on DG. Still, these performances are classics in the truest sense of the word: path breaking recordings that, along with concurrent cycles by Kubelik, Haitink, and Abravanel, made the 1960s the “Mahler decade” everywhere but in the UK, where they are now desperately plowing through dismal BBC archival recordings by the likes of Horenstein and Barbirolli in a sad attempt to re-write recorded history and demonstrate that Mahler was a happening thing in the 60s there too. Well, the truth is right here, in this very reasonably priced box. Go for it.
