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From Left background:
Horenstein / LSO on Nonesuch
Walter / PSONY on Columbia (pre RIAA)
Solti / LSO on London
Leinsdorf / BSO on RCA (Dynagroove)
Abravanel / USO on Vanguard Everyman
Today it is the Thorens TD150 (R7-2) that gets the record spinning duties.Sometimes I wonder why it is that people even listen to this music. At times, when hearing the worst of performances I might have considered that the composer was simply working a copy/paste blocks of music approach. And then I picked up a book on Mahler and his Symphonies in hopes of understanding just what it is/was that keeps people returning to Mahler.
The book has much factual history based on letters to and from Mahler by the people he associated with in his professional lifetime. One quote from a letter Mahler wrote to Natalie Bauer-Lechner goes like this:..."composing is like playing with building blocks. Indeed, these blocks have been there, ready to be used, since childhood, the only time that it is designed for gathering"
Comfirmation! He's composing or deriving his music into blocks and then plugging the blocks into place to make his symphonies.
He uses a combination of original composition and also traditional folk melodies and songs of his era and environment. For instance, the 3rd movt. in Symphony No. 1 is derived from a song titled "Brother Martin Are You Sleeping". A French version of the same tune is titled Frere Jacques. Only Mahler puts it into a minor key, then paces it to play like a funeral procession part way to make it seem grim and foreboding.
So he is saying that he feels it ok to make use of popular melodies by plugging them into larger works when he feels that it fits. Yup.
But....but what does it all mean? Well....Mahler doesn't want his music to be categorized into the same genre as was "Impressionism" in the Paris art world of the time. Yet, he does mean to provide the listener / audience with an auditory impression that they might interpret into a visual experience.
-Steve
reference: Gustav Mahler "The Symphonies". by Constantin Floros.
ISBN: 1-57467-025-5
Edits: 06/23/16 06/24/16Follow Ups:
For incredibly insightful performance, though musicians are clearly tired by the end. Walter's stereo version another fav.
Never thought of this symphony in blocks. Messiaen's Turangalila yes, but not mahler.
i think my fave of #1 is klauss tennstedt and the london s.o. i was listening to a classical station in LA mot knowing what was playing. i tried to wait for it to stop so i could hear the announcer back announce the piece. and i waited.....
i was on my lunch and i wanted to buy a paper, the Recycler (now it's free) so i went into the store and when i came out, it was STILL on. it was wonderful, whatever it was, and it kept plaaaying, on and on.
FINALLY the announcer identified it. i DID track it down and got what i wanted. i saw another version by KT with a different orchestra and it din't nearly measure up.
i like bernstein's version and horenstein but the KT w/LSO is IT for me.
...regards...tr
I find it fascinating, and very impressive, that Mahler essentially wrote these enormous compositions during his summer holidays, almost one per year. You hear about Beethoven, say, shuffling a set of assorted sketches around for years, and then eventually coming up with something like the Missa Solemnis, but Mahler basically wrote his whole series of symphonies in a series of hyper-intense three-month sittings.
I certainly wouldn't take anything away form Mahler for the "building blocks" technique. If you look at Beethoven's sketchbooks he has all these fragments which he doesn't really know yet where they are going to fit in. It might be in a symphony or a string quartet. In the end, some of them find their way into the piece he has in his mind, after he has crafted each melodic germ laboriously into shape. The astonishing thing is that in the finished work you feel that each element of the piece has always been there, and MUST have always been there.
I generally don't feel a sense of patchwork in Mahler's music - the symphonies to me have mostly felt quite through-composed and internally consistent, with one or two exceptions like the finales of the Fifth and Seventh. The Ninth certainly comes across as one huge arch.
Alex
Alex
"I generally don't feel a sense of patchwork in Mahler's music - the symphonies to me have mostly felt quite through-composed and internally consistent, with one or two exceptions like the finales of the Fifth and Seventh. The Ninth certainly comes across as one huge arch."Me too. On only one occasion did I sense any discontinuity between movements, and even within movements..... that would be Mahler No. 6 as performed by George Solti / Chicago Symphony on London. It may have been partly induced by my mood or maybe it just was the performance. My impression on this one performance was negative.
Having said that I have different performances of No. 6 by different Conductors and Orchestras that do not overtly reveal its assembly block origins.
And I don't get this with any of the performances I have heard of symphony #1. There are moments within the 3rd and 4th movements of it that do command my focus. A sense of mystery, even conspiracy within the forest, perhaps among the forest creatures. I think Abravanel/USO manages to convey this particular impression for me better than the other performances that I have on record.
-Steve
Edits: 06/24/16
Composers work in different ways...
Great, thanks. I love this work very much. In addition to yours, I also love Giulini/CSO.
Beautiful sentiments and a beautiful vinyl set up.
Thank You!
"If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them" - Sol Hurok
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