Word: mahler
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...section, the vocalists speak and sing excerpts from Beckett's The Unnamable, swatches from James Joyce, even slogans that were scribbled on the walls of the Sorbonne during last May's student insurrection. All the while, the orchestra plays a convoluted version of the third movement from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, as snippets of Debussy, Bach, Stravinsky and a dozen other composers float in and out of Berio's nightmarish stream of semiconsciousness. In one sense, the words do not matter; Berio is not interested in making a song. He is communicating a kind of life...
...birthday bash prepared for the ballroom of the Brussels Hilton, with a lot of U.S. and Belgian officials and all 109 members of the New York Philharmonic Symphony invited. The musicians were not to supply the dance music; they were co-celebrators. The gifts included an original edition of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony and a home stereo installation. Among the decorations: three 100-lb. sculptures of musicians carved in butter...
...possible and put them next to the right other picture, and that's called programming. The whole idea of the concert hall grew up with the idea of the symphony. It began in the 18th century and finished with the beginning of the 20th century: from Mozart to Mahler, roughly. The symphonic form is dead, finished. But why despair about it? Just accept it. That tremendous repertory of masterpieces should go on and on for hundreds of years just as Rembrandts...
...like a connoisseur. He has known the rich, the beautiful and the talented, and he appears to have put them into his novel as vividly and intimately as in a diary. Freud, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Arnold Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg make cameo appearances. Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, Max Reinhardt, and several society beauties of the '30s are only slightly disguised. The author mocks, but he also burnishes his characters with an élan found all too rarely in current fiction...
...memory of a doom-laden summer started him on the book, the only novel he plans to write, nearly two decades later. "I knew what was coming," he said. "The streets were choked with Mercedes full of Nazis. But all that those dear people talked about was whether Mahler or Bruckner was a better composer-that was the big debate then. To this day I don't understand why they didn't see it and get out; but the sad truth is that no matter what public tragedy is looming, people continue acting out their own private comedies...