Word: mahlers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...full-out orchestra. With precision and grace last week it swung through Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, Glazounov's Une Féte slave. Jovita Fuentes, Filipino soprano who has sung Madam Butterfly from China to Nazi Germany, sang a set of Gustav Mahler's most ivory-turreted Lieder...
...30Crimson Concert Master: Handel: Organ Concerto and music of Hindemith and Beethoven. 8:45 Louis Roney '42, Tenor. 9:00 "Hot Off the Record." 9:30 Crimson Concert Hall: Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. 10:30 Granville-Barker, Reading. 10:45 George A. Field 2G, Monologues. News...
There has been a lot of resurrecting going on lately. Dmitri Mitropoulos uncarthed the Mahler First Symphony, and played it over the air. Igor Stravinsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikowski's Second Symphony last weekend, and next Sunday Bruno Walter expects to dust a few cobwebs from the Bruckner Eighth. All of which means that an increasingly mature music public is starting to demand its share of lesser-known, lesser-played works. Having been fed for the past decade on a staple diet of symphonic roast beef-the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Wagner excerpts, Von Weber overtures...
However, this quest for music-off-the-beaten-track lends a certain amount of zest to concert-going. Mitropoulous himself would not pretend that the Mahler First is anything but a very bad symphony. Nobody, even the most ardent Mahlerite, imagines that there is anything important or cosmic about the first movement, for example, which goes on for about fifteen-minutes with little woodland chirpings and bleatings of the clarinet, and launches into a phony folk-lore theme which, after muddling around soupily in the horns through another ten minutes, finally expires in sheer exhaustion. Nobody, I say, could honestly...
Tchaikowski's Second Symphony was more worth bothering about than the Mahler Symphony, although the fact that its melodies are weaker, less distinguished, and less surehanded than those of the later symphonies will probably cause its rejection. But in no way does it merit Cui's contemptuous epithets of "rough and commonplace. . . . pompous and trivial . . . neither good nor bad." It is fun to listen to, and that is more than can be said for a good deal of the stuff that is perpetrated in concert-halls today...