Mahler: Symphony No. 2  Debussy: Jeux  Berg: Three Pieces...
October 24, 1993|By Alan G. Artner.  Mahler: Symphony No. 2;
Debussy: Jeux; Berg: Three Pieces, Op. 6 Felicity Palmer,
soprano; Tatiana Troyanos, alto; BBC Symphony; London
Philharmonic Choir; BBC Choral Society; Orchestre de la Societe
des Concerts du Conservatoire; Pierre Boulez, conductor
(Enterprise Documents).  The exploration begun by the centennial
of the birth of Gustav Mahler in 1960 brought a number of
unexpected conductors to his music, including Boulez, who in the
following decades gave several concert performances of Mahler
symphonies but commercially recorded only the Adagio from the
Tenth, the "Ruckert" Lieder and the first complete version of
the early cantata "Das Klagende Lied."  The rhetoric of the
"Resurrection" Symphony would not seem to have appealed to the
fastidious conductor. But here he leads a stirring live account
from 1973 that drives and yields in the right places but does
not exaggerate them, being reminiscent of such