Mahler

I don't have much time for no.1.

(p.s. ferrier wins)

Anyone else heard the Uri Caine album?

No.1 justs seems like the work of a hack compared to 5-7. I think they're endlessly inventive and astonishingly fertile. I listen to them all the time really (+9).

Also i can't listen to no.2 that often. It really can be super-dull.

I find myself most frequently going to the recording of the 9th with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic, but that may be a product of mood -- I live in a frantic city and balance many activities, so the attentiveness and particular gestalt that Mahler compels is a rare commodity with me; the 9th fits my tastes more easily than other works. A caveat: I tend to favor his later work, but as I'm more disposed towards 20th century/avant-garde composers, some of the more formalist/romantic Mahler is not so much my cup of tea -- in this regard I differ from some other fans of his composition.

Also, don't you think the 3rd is incredibly avant-garde, particularly the ist mvmnt? The 9th for me is less a symphony and more an extraordinary world which you can enter and allow your personality to dissolve in it's warmth. The 1st mvmnt is the greatest thing ever written by anyone.

My categorizing a piece as "romantic" tends to be more about the sonority and tonality than about his compositional intent -- I agree with you that he's a very complex composer and it's difficult to parse his intent for a given piece, which may involve many levels. If he were more obvious in where he was coming from, perhaps he'd be less interesting.

Spencer: what movie?

(Btw in case anyone's wondering i like all those qualities about Mahler.....)

No love for the fourth yet...? It's his most straightforward symphony, and one of his most enjoyable. The first is enjoyable too, but its pastiches and so forth are kind of heavy-handed.

Riccardo Chailly and Claudio Abbado are a couple of other good Mahler conductors - Abbado's fourth with Frederica von Stade is particularly good.

I'd say search most of the symphonies, to various degrees, esp 4,6,7,9. The only one I'd destroy would be the 8th.

taking sides: schubert vs mahler

Agree about the 8th partially. Sometimes i can really get into it, in performance, but it doesn't stick in your head as much, i find.
A case of note-spinning, perhaps?
It's sort of Mahler without the get-out clauses, all passion and noise and little ironic distance.
That said, some of the motifs are very 'modernist', anticipating Stravinsky for example.

Mostly because it's not as urgent as 6 and not as weird as 7. Plus the Adagietto has perhaps become over-familiar.

I don't know. It's his middle symphony and somehow it seems like it's the middle-ground of his symphonies, too - the elements in it that I like are elaborated better elsewhere.

Most of all, though, regardless of the explanation, "because I hardly ever listen to it".

Mahler, I don't like much, I'm afraid.

its interesting her folksong interpretations belong to a decidedly pre-midcentury-folk-revival mentality...they are sung recital-style with arrangements that while lacking the trickiness of classical arrangements still have little to do with actual folk arrangements. they fit somewhere between the incorporation and interpretation of folk songs by the 19th c. composers and the styles of people like richard dyer-bennett and ewan maccoll that were to come. sorry if i ramble... just thinking aloud

this is mahler thread sorry

I have rocked the 8th so much these last couple of months. Mahler is so special, so out there.

There's a pp bit about 8 minutes into the second movement that's been ripped by every prog rock band ever.

Simon Rattle's versions of Mahler symphonies are in a super cheap box set in HMV at the moment. I might get it, I might. Also Sibelius, but I don't know if they rock.

Bits of Sibelius I've heard on the radio didn't rock hugely but maybe I haven't heard the good stuff. Can't remember much of Finlandia. Wierdly it's kind of not pastoral enough for me.

Fischer-Dieskau singing the lieder with Bernstein on piano is a reliable, always-welcome disc - reduced to piano and voice, what's often heard as histrionics is just the simple power of those melodies, those intervals, that melding of the worldly and the infinite.

Has no one mentioned the 2nd ('Resurrection') at this point yet? It's hard to find a more powerful climax than that (at the very end).

I like the 1st, at least the first movement is quite great.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HAQ5TPK1L._SS400_.jpg

great set!

Mahler wars, sorta.

haha so the guy basically pays these guys wages (or at least invests a lot of money in music biz) and yet the complain if he once and a while conduct a lil' symphony. Bastards. :)

Kaplan's obsession with this one symphony is a touch weird.

http://alexrossmusic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/12/2007_10_11mahler2.jpg

Adagietto from Symphony No. 5... sob!

While his 5th is not my very favorite of his symphonies, it's the one I listen to the most. I gnaw at it like a tasty old bone. My current favorite: Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, live, from the box set of his Xmas Day Mahler performances (xmas mahler matinee is some kind of tradition in Amsterdam).

I've never heard any before, I just found this piece on an old CD that I inherited from my Dad's small classical collection. Further investigation needed.

Was thinking about doing a Mahler Symphonies poll as a spur to get me to listen to them all properly.

xpost The 5th is a good one for you to begin with, I think. For an easily obtainable good recording, I'd say Benjamin Zander/Philharmonia Orch on Telarc. You get a free bonus CD with that where Zander talks about the 5th in an accessible manner.

Revive!

The wikipedia entry on the 7th says there is an Otto Klemperer-conducted recording that lasts 100 minutes! Anyone heard it?

Going to see Symphony No. 6 tonight.

It was utterly sublime. An amalgamation of all kinds of wonderful.

and what about the Mahler?

What orchestra/conductor was it?

Seeing a live performance of #6 is at the very top of my to-do list. Would love to see Boulez conduct it while he's still on this earth. Since I live in NYC, I reckon my chances are pretty good (though I missed him a couple of years ago).

Perpetually impossible for me to decide between 5, 6, 9 and Das Lied Von Der Erde as favorites. Spent pretty much all of January and February on a giant Mahler jag, comparing performances-- this happens every couple of years.

Aye, the Mahler was pretty good too!

It was the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Stéphane Denève.

This was my first classical concert of adulthood, so I don't feel particularly experienced to comment other than that I totally loved it.

They're doing Mahler's Symphony No. 4 at the end of the month, so I've picked up a CD of that today and will head along to the concert.

So far I've only heard Numbers 5 & 6, which are both awesome.

a number of people have informed me that with my musical tastes I would go nutwire for Mahler - so yeah if I ever have money I'll be down for a showing

krakow, how were the 'hammer blows' in the finale? Did they make a sonic impression? Did the percussionist play up the visual aspect of the hammer blows? (I have heard of performances where a dude stands on a riser with literally a giant comedy mallet and hits a giant cube).

You'll find symphony 4 as much of a contrast with 6 as you can imagine. In #6 we have a strong man brought low by fate and totally annihilated, in #4 we have a wry kind of a black forest folktale world where children starve to death but get to eat lots of candy in heaven after.

The Royal Scottish are a pretty damn good orchestra. On their series of Bax symphonies on Naxos, they play the hell out of those very decadent and unruly pieces.

What recording of sym #4 did you get?

We were seated literally in the front row (cheap seats), so didn't have the best view of anything but the front violinists' shoes, upskirt peeks and the conductor's theatricality.

I could just see the percussionist doing the big hammer blows at the end from my seat and I certainly found it very funny - the mallet was so ridiculously huge and all I could see was him weilding this beast above his head in a desperate two-handed grip and then the kind of disappointingly dull thump of it falling, which is much less impressive than the visual aspect and didn't even compete in terms of sonic power with lots of the other more normal bits of percussion.

upskirt peeks

on a first date too; okcupid never ceases to amaze me

I got a Classics For Pleasure version of Symphony No. 4, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jascha Horenstein with Dame Margaret Price as soprano.

It was recommended quite highly as a budget choice in my slightly older Gramophone guide (though I think it's been dropped in the newest one), and my local classical place had it with one of their 'Penguin Guide Recommended Recording ***' stickers, so I went for it at about half the price of the other recommended ones.

Yeah that's always the problem it seems-- making it SOUND like it looks. On a lot of studio recordings, the hammerblows come out sounding like no more than a hard kettledrum hit.

Incidentally, on the fairly recent David Zinman/Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra/RCA-BMG recording of the 6th, the hammerblows come out RIDICULOUSLY heavy, I almost think they overdubbed them but it sure works.

Ah that's a very good 4th! Know that it's an unusual one in its emphasis on the dark side-- normally a more Grimm Bros. kind of smiling irony is employed, but Horenstein in Mahler is the master of grim concentration.

I think that could be a good slant for me, more grimmness should suit.

I love the 6th. The andante is simply everything that is good about the world.

O M G the San Francisco Symphony performed Symphony 2 last night--there was a level of excitement to begin with as they brought out the Grammy for their CD of Mahler's 8th from last year...the mayor gave a speech, even. Then they proceeded to send the audience straight to heaven. When the choir kicked in at the end I was in another dimension entirely. What an amazing night of music.

It really doesn't get any better than Ferrier singing Das Lied, does it?

hey guys if you have been curious about Mahler but don't know where to start let me tell you something: this is a fucking outstanding 2-CD set. dunno if ppl are purist about "hear the movements in the context of their symphonies" but everybody knows Mahler is the adagio king and this thing is like being drowned in awesomeness.

http://www.deccaclassics.com/cat/single?PRODUCT_NR=4782342

Did the artwork guy get Vienna confused with Venice?

naw I think it's that the adagietto from the 5th was used to great effect in a film of death in vencie or thus saith wikipedia - I think a lot of people were first exposed to mahler via that movie

now playing, mahler's arrangements of schumann's symphonies -- no. 3 is quite remarkable imo

the new rattle no. 2 mentioned here sure seems like something. but it's been years since i heard any other performance, so i can't compare them to what i'm hearing now.

Oh, I'd be interested in that!

the brass in the first movement are really liquid.

have classical recordings gotten bassier in the last ten-fifteen years?

On the first disc of Warner's Complete Works, "Das Klagende Lied" has traffic noises and a sound that comes up every now and then, can't work out what the hell it is. It sounds like a guy with a sock in his mouth shagging.

Found one review that said it was a bad recording. But I'm new to Mahler and quite blown away by it nonetheless.

I always thought his 6th sounds like a soundtrack to apocalyptic wars and tragedy. On R3 they were discussing Bernstein and his love of Mahler, and someone was saying Bernstein considered Mahler a prophet, who as a Jew could feel the shit times coming back for them in Europe, and his 6th was a premonition of the coming storms etc.

Definitely. The 6th as always has some klezmer-derived themes, particularly the "mocking theme" of the 1st and 2nd movements (the scherzo, which is sometimes placed 3rd - wrongly!). The perversion and destruction of provincial German Jewish culture was always at the back of Mahler's mind I think. He was forced to renounce his Jewishness and convert to Catholicism to conduct in Vienna, so I think he gets his own back with these subversive musical reminders of his Jewish heritage. He also wouldn't have faced such pressure if he'd been able to go to New York earlier (but he wasn't famous enough yet - for his conducting only I might add! The public were barely interested in his music).
It's also often argued that Mahler was prophesying the death of his children. No 6 incorporates themes from his just completed Kindertotenlieder (particularly the Andante) and a couple of years later Mahler and Alma's daughter Maria died at the age of four and a half, and their other daughter Anna came close to death.
The last movement seems to embrace extra-personal significance though, it's so huge and dramatic.

Going to see Mahler 3 at proms this Sunday, Boston SO with Andris Nelsons :D

ah, thanks for that bit of excellent knowledge, glumd. I didn't know about the subversive klezmer elements of the 6th and that adds a lot to my appreciation of it.

concert on R3 tonight on this very topic:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002cdy

Thomas Dausgaard is a conductor who delights in exploring the complex roots that feed into composers' music. In this concert he brings together 3 composers with an influence of Jewish music alongside the renowned Klezmer band, She'Koyokh.
The first half begins with Bernstein's Candide Overture and a rare chance to hear the cello work Schelomo by Bloch: cellist Jian Wang joins the orchestra.
And in the second half a performance of Mahler's First Symphony is introduced by a prelude performance of Jewish folk music by the band along with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - to hear what resonances emerge.

This stage performance of Resurrection (including a performance of Symphony No. 2) has a team of UN relief workers unearthing a mass grave in real time. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts. Naturally it's divisive, but wildly ambitious and unflinching as well.

Streaming live right now, but hopefully will be available for rewatching on Arte's site:
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/109365-000-A/resurrection-d-apres-mahler/

A review here that captures the show. (Also has been written up this week in the NY Times, etc.)