Word: mahlers
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Everything else about this musical is marvelously right. What is there to say about Stephen Sondheim, the composer-lyricist, except that his songs are the most unusual ever written for the American musical stage? There are no conventional, Tin-Pan-Alley tunes here: the influences are Weill and Mahler and the melodies trail off into surprising and often jarring rhapsodies of sound...
...clothes are hand-me-downs from his movies, and his only two luxuries are his sports cars, a Ferrari and a Lotus (on which he is still making payments). A big evening is dinner with his wife in an obscure restaurant, a movie, listening to records (anything from Mahler to The Cream) or playing with his three children...
...rather than as a debilitating confusion of introspection with self-pity, or a lamentation on the evanescence of all things cherishable. It was, hopefully, a deeper recognition of mutability and then transcendence over corruptibility. The excellent program notes' suggestion that "Bruckner exalts the same romanticism, through classical gestures, that Mahler dialectically challenges and puts to the test," is an illuminating insight harmed by misplaced emphasis, for Bruckner's romanticism, like that of all men, was sui generis, and in his particular case consisted primarily of unshakeable Roman Catholicism...
...humanism, the same sustenance of spiritual and intellectual resolution, which he found in classical sonata form. His music proceeds with the deliberateness, comprehensiveness, mystical assurance, and formal clarity of the Mass. His symphonies are celebratory but never indulge in an easy rapture of tonal staleness or facile dramaturgy. Mahler learned much from Bruckner, primarily thematic linking of unprecedented subtlety among movements, the proliferation of material in the second thematic group, the immediate juxtaposition of radically differing elements (here Mahler extended Bruckner's simpler process of motto-lyrical oppositions to ironic commentary on all materials), and the greatest lesson...
...FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Erich Leinsdorf, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, rehearses the young players of the New England Conservatory of Music's senior orchestra in Mahler's Symphony...