The Solti recording is horrible. The whole cycle isn't that distinguished (apart from the very convincing 8th), but of all the recordings in it, the 7th is by far the worst. I hesitate to say things like that because I respect Solti's many achievements on record (and I also saw him live a number of times in Berlin and these concerts were usually very good and enjoyable), but he obviously didn't understand the music at all. His interpretation doesn't make any musical sense. He and the orchestra hack, slash, blare, honk and fart through the piece without any concept or musical line and not even technically that good (one of many low points is that complicated bass trombone solo halfway through the 1st movement which the player here simply can't play, it sounds like some animal regurgitating a smaller animal). That piece is just too complex and elusive for Solti's black-and-white approach. I wonder if they had ever played the piece before. It certainly does sound like they are sight reading.
The same orchestra made much more sense and music and sounds worlds better under Abbado's much more insightful and reflected direction a decade later. Interestingly, they had also recorded it under Levine in the meantime. That performance is much better than Solti's but it lacks the sense for color, texture, and the musical line that Abbado's has. The latter was for a long time my "reference" recording for this symphony. One of Abbado's great achievements as Kapellmeister here is that he actually manages to make the brass play musical lines instead of single notes one after the other and that he even manages to build up some multicolored layers where the CSO sections usually play against each other instead of together. I haven't heard his later BP recording yet, nor the one with the LFO.
I was bitterly disappointed by the Boulez recording with the Cleveland Orchestra. Probably because I had expected something very special from that team. But the recording is just a competently prepared playthrough without much character or atmoshpere. A whole lot like the cliché says a lot of Boulez' interpretations are, but many of them really aren't (including some outstanding ones he made with the CO, e.g. Le Sacre du Printemps or La Mer).
A rather special trip of discovery through this complex musical soundscape is Sinopoli's recording with the Philharmonia which brings out a lot of inner detail which some other conductors apparently haven't even discovered in the score yet. With a lot of readings, you wonder what is going on, this one makes you understand how this piece in particular foreshadowed a lot of the music of the Second Viennese School. It also has a very special half-lit but glowing quality in the treatment of the colors to it which is very apt for a mysterious nightly journey of discovery.
The Barenboim recording simply astonished me. Barenboim is not the kind of conductor who I would expect to make sense of this really complicated and sometimes apparently incoherent score. He is often content to make everything sound nice and maybe a little serious. But he totally does make sense of the music here. He said something along the lines of that he found this symphony a challenge to figure out and because a lot of conductors who do a lot of other Mahler shy away from it, he wanted to confront himself with the score. And he did with very convincing results. Plus the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin is extremely good and transparent, the slightly old-fashioned sound of the orchestra is very apt for the music and captured extremely well by the recording. The recording quality belies the idea that making good recordings in the Philharmonie is difficult. It isn't, it's just that the DG engineers who did most of the recordings there in the past like to fiddle with the knobs too much.
