Word: mahler
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...MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 4 (Columbia). This glorious work contains Mahler's song "Das himmlische Leben," and George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recreate the Teutonic paradise. Judith Raskin, who sings the three soprano solos, sounds warm and free, yet her precise technique never allows a hint of bombast. "St. Cecilia with all her relatives are the excellent court musicians," goes the final refrain of the song, and the Cleveland and Miss Raskin could not be better described...
...MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 10 (2 LPs; Columbia). Gustav Mahler died in 1911 after orchestrating about half of his last symphony. Several Mahlerites have fleshed out the last movements, including British Composer Deryck Cooke (TIME, Nov. 26), whose inspired and faithful version was used for this first recording. The anxieties of Mahler's last summer, including illness and a marital crisis, along with the marginal notes on his manuscript ("Oh God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"), suggest that the music is programmatic in the most personal way. It is a melody-drenched, emotional and yet finally serene farewell to life...
Apes & Cockatoos. He was a concert pianist, an intimate friend of Chopin and Liszt, and one of the finest post-Beethoven composers for piano. He was known as the Berlioz of the piano. His music reflected none of the warm rhapsodical reveries of Chopin and Liszt but, rather, foreshadowed Mahler and Bruckner. A moody, eccentric loner, Alkan retired from public life at 42 to study the Talmud, teach, and compose. One of the pieces he composed, curiously enough, was a funeral march for a parakeet...
...classical side, the great calliopes of the big-city symphony orchestras boomed right along. One of the more intriguing events: the first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 10, reconstructed by musicologists from a sketch left by the composer at his death 51 years ago. If any major new contemporary composers made their appearance, the news...
...remained for the 20-minute-long fifth movement, which one critic called "among the very greatest things that Mahler has left us," to lift the pall of futility. The doom-laden thump of a muffled drum, an idea that Mahler conceived one day when he heard the drums of a funeral procession passing his Manhattan apartment, intrudes repeatedly, driving back the forces of light. Then, unfurling slowly, the divergent strands of the opening themes are resolved in a finale of radiant transfiguration, ending as serenely as oncoming sleep - or death. "The Tenth" says Cooke, "holds the secret of Mahler...