Word: mahler
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When Gustav Mahler stepped down from the podium one evening in 1895 after conducting the first full performance of his Second Symphony, the Berlin audience was hostile, and the critics fumed about "the cynical impudence of this brutal music maker." The response was characteristic of most Mahler premières. Venerated by a handful of his fellow musicians, Mahler was misunderstood by his public and despised as a martinet by the singers and players who performed under his baton. Now, in the centennial year of his birth, the musical world is taking a fresh look at the last...
...works composed in this century, then this speaks ill for Harvard's intelligentsia. Certainly the first and last pieces on the program by Samuel Barber and Manuel DeFalla could not possibly be considered "difficult" works and, to those familiar with Schoenberg's atonal period and the orchestral songs of Mahler, the Octandre by Edgar Varese, the French avant-garde composer and the Four Orchestra Songs by a young American, Benjamin Cutler, should not have posed insuperable problems of listening. More importantly, perhaps, they all provided ample opportunity for the orchestra to demonstrate its improved technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity...
...whole of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise and through the complete Schumann Dichterliebe. He has reached an even wider public through his 40-odd LP recordings, including Hugo Wolf's 16 Songs, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, Brahms's German Requiem, albums of Mahler songs...
...made his debut in Rigoletto in 1903, sang 607 performances of 36 operas in the next 17 seasons, and transformed the Met into a genuinely popular house. Soprano Geraldine Farrar, trailed by a worshipful female fan club of self-styled "gerryflappers," reigned with him. But Arturo Toscanini, with Gustav Mahler, the greatest of the Met's conductors, deftly cut his singers to size, and in only seven seasons changed the house from a kind of glorified star club into a smooth-functioning repertory theater. During one rehearsal, temperamental Soprano Farrar turned to him in a fury and shouted...
...Mahler: Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection" (Emilia Cundari, Maureen Forrester, Westminster Choir; New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bruno Walter; Columbia, 2 LPs). An invaluable record of a mammoth mixture of mysticism, romanticism and folklore by a composer often rated alongside history's greatest, conducted by his disciple, close friend and most inspired interpreter...