Word: mahlers
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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...
...Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Bruno Walter conducting; Victor; 20 sides; $10.50). A vast, brooding, world-weary work by a composer who, 30 years after his death, still starts critical dogfights. Mahler's friends say that he stormed heaven; his enemies, that he was a frustrated bootstrap-lifter. The friends will welcome this recording of a beautiful concert-hall performance...
...unusual. Finishing off with the boisterous drunkards' chorus from Moussorgsky's "Kovantschina," and the sparkling finale of the "Gondoliers," the program leaves the listener, relaxed on the grass, in a peasant frame of mind--or more so, than would Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle, a Frescobaldi motet, or the Mahler "Resurrection" Symphony...
...begged off, suggested Lukas Foss. He wrote the music in a month, based much of it (by request) on Sicilian folk tunes, turned in a remarkably workmanlike score. Archaic in mood, making deft use of a small orchestra, The Tempest reminded some listeners of Austria's late Gustav Mahler...