Word: mahlers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter conducting, with Kerstin Thorborg, contralto, and Charles Kullman, tenor; Columbia; 14 sides). A reissue of Columbia's 1936 recording, when the Vienna Philharmonic was still at its pre-Nazi best. Mahler's symphonic setting of the verses of Li Tai Po and other Chinese immortals remains one of the few great musical compositions of the 20th Century, one of the most tragic works in all musical literature...
...there were no redeeming features in the other two selections on the program. Burgin's direction of Haydn's C-minor Symphony lacked the lustre and precision of a Koussevitsky' performance; the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony was nearly as oppressive as the full six movements would have been. The evening proved conclusively that it takes more than a good soloist and a good orchestra to make a good program...
...late Felix Weingartner was the last of a generation of European super-conductors, and his recent death means the end of a musical era, as well as a great loss to Columbia. He, and his contemporaries, Seidl, Mahler, Mottl, etc., grew up in Germany when Germany was cock of the musical roost and knew it. They worked under Liszt in Weimar, they learnt their Wagner opera in Bayrenth under the eye of the "Master," and in the flush post-war days they made Salzburg a summer Mecca for European big-wigs, where Mozart and Beethoven had to fight Schiaparell...
...most of Shostakovich's later music, there are traces of Beethoven, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, moderns like Poulenc and Busoni. The Seventh Symphony has been described by those who have already heard it as a modern Russian version of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. It has also been called a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today...
...fairly penetrating essay entitled "The Emotional Essence of Brahms," written by none other than Dr. Koussevitzky, which appeared in the May Atlantic, should be a telling blow on behalf of its author in our current Battle of the Conductors. Besides being, with the exception of Walter's book on Mahler, the sole piece of intelligent prose published by a major American conductor on musical history or theory for the last ten years, it reveals Boston's Bayard as a keen historical analyst with broad-based Van-Wyck-Brooksian sympathies. This may seem like the introduction of strange standards...