Word: mahler
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...MAHLER...
...this time. Ken Russell should have got sick of being told he has gone too far. But on he goes, each new movie an exercise in further excess. Mahler -which appeared in England two years ago but is only now being released in the U.S.-is a discombobulated. flatulent film that bears only a glancing resemblance to the life of the post-Romantic composer...
...interested in the fine details of fact. He is not much interested in narrative structure either, or intellectual or emotional consistency. What interests Russell most is turmoil, and where there are not sufficient amounts available in his subject's life, he will supply his own. So in Mahler the composer (Robert Powell) imagines himself in the midst of a pop fantasy involving Cosima Wagner, Nazis, Crosses, Jewish stars and a crimson seesaw; this is Russell's representation of Mahler's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. The scene-like much of the movie-means to be shocking...
OONLY A PSYCHIATRIST can help poor Schoenberg now...He would do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music paper." So wrote Richard Strauss in a letter to Alma Mahler, voicing an opinion that is shared by most listeners today...
...Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G (Judith Blegen, soprano; Chicago Symphony; James Levine, conductor; RCA, $6.98). There appears to be little that James Levine, 31, cannot do, except perhaps play Scott Joplin on the tuba. The remarkable new music director of the Metropolitan Opera already has several superlative operatic recordings to his credit (notably / Vespri Siciliani on RCA and Joan of Arc on Angel). This version of Mahler's Fourth, a genial pastoral masterpiece, has a flowing line rarely matched in current interpretations and an intimacy that, comes close to Bruno Walter's incomparable recording of the 1940s...