Word: mahler
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...short-lived. Synthesizers are enjoying a particular vogue just now because, in the words of one composer-arranger, "they fulfill pop music's never-ending quest for fresh ear candy," but entertainment-industry enthusiasms are notoriously transient, and next year may bring a rage for Mahler-size orchestras or Renaissance recorder ensembles. And despite its mockingbird predilections, the synthesizer still sounds, at root, mechanical...
LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO MAHLER'S NINTH SYMPHONY...
...themes: the wonder of discovery and the need for humility when faced with nature's endless secrets. "It is not just that there is more to do," he writes, "there is everything to do." Urgent notes are struck, especially in the title piece. The final strains of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony no longer evoke a musical metaphor for death's natural release. The long string passage now stirs images of the world's end. The reason for the change is that the sage has been caught up in the nuclear arms debate: "Words like disaster...
...have never had a better-spirited orchestra than this one," says Solti, 70. "If they have a conductor they respect, they will go through hell for him." The Chicago spirit is evident both in music of the classical period, like Mozart's, and in the great romantic works: Mahler and Bruckner symphonies and Strauss tone poems. Last week's dazzling performance under Solti of Wagner's complete opera Das Rheingold matched an orchestra at the top of its form with a conductor at the height of his interpretive prowess...
...problem child among orchestras, the Philharmonic is like the little girl with the curl. Plagued by a reputation as a temperamental aggregation, it sometimes lives up to it, as it did last year on the occasion of its 10,000th concert when it delivered a ragged account of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Yet under Music Director Zubin Mehta, 46, it can also deliver a blistering performance of something as difficult as Schoenberg's expressionist opera Erwartung, as it did recently with Soprano Hildegarde Behrens. Among other distinctions, the Philharmonic is the most unpredictable orchestra in America...