Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 7

Kirill Petrenko’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, released in 2021 on the orchestra’s own BSOrec label, won the Orchestral Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2022, beating a shortlist that included John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London and Jordi Savall’s complete Beethoven cycle with Le Concert des Nations. It’s a significant result for a still-young in-house label, and for a symphony that has a reputation as one of the hardest in Mahler’s output to bring off convincingly on record.

Why this symphony is a genuine test

Mahler’s Seventh doesn’t come with the kind of extra-musical scaffolding that shapes how listeners approach some of his other symphonies, there’s no title, no explicit programme, no vocal text to anchor the argument. Its five movements include two marked “Nachtmusik” (night music), framing a central scherzo, and a finale in C major that has divided critical opinion for decades: some hear it as a triumphant, even ironic culmination; others find it the work’s least settled movement. Because the piece resists an obvious narrative reading, a performance stands or falls on how convincingly the conductor holds its shifting textures and moods together across nearly 80 minutes, which is exactly why relatively few recordings of it are considered fully successful.

About the performers

Kirill Petrenko served as the Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s music director and the Bayerische Staatsoper’s general music director from 2013 to 2020, before moving to Berlin to take up the chief conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the most prominent posts in orchestral music. This Mahler Seventh was recorded during his Munich tenure, with an orchestra he’d led for the better part of a decade by that point, which shows in the recording’s evident familiarity between conductor and ensemble. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester has a documented lineage stretching back over 500 years as the opera house’s pit orchestra, and its BSOrec label was launched specifically to give recordings like this one, made in-house, without needing an external major-label deal, a proper commercial release.

What the recording is like

Critical response to the recording, both from Gramophone’s own reviewers and elsewhere, centred on Petrenko’s control of structure across the symphony’s episodic shifts, moving between the outer movements’ turbulence, the two Nachtmusik movements’ more intimate scoring (the second bringing in guitar and mandolin, an unusual touch in Mahler’s orchestration), and the scherzo’s uneasy, shadowy character, without the results feeling like a sequence of disconnected episodes. That’s the specific problem this symphony poses to any conductor, and it’s the specific thing the Gramophone panel judged this account to have solved better than its rivals that year.

Where this fits in Mahler’s output

The Seventh sits between two very differently received symphonies, the tragic Sixth and the enormous, choral Eighth (“Symphony of a Thousand”), and has often been treated as the odd one out of the three, less immediately graspable than either neighbour. That reputation has shifted over recent decades as more conductors have taken it on seriously rather than treating it as a lesser entry in the cycle, and a recording arriving with the backing of a major award from a panel of specialist critics is itself part of that ongoing reassessment, evidence that a symphony once considered a relative outlier can still produce a genuinely first-rank account.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, current recording, not part of the archive recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 run as a CD specialist. We’re extending the same critical attention to what’s actually being recorded and awarded today, alongside the archive of older reviews we’ve been able to recover. Every fact here, the award, the label, the personnel, the symphony’s structure, has been independently verified rather than assumed.