Word: mahlers
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...words of 8th century Chinese Poet Li T'ai-Po had special poignance for Gustav Mahler in 1907. Aware that he was dying of a heart ailment, the composer felt a heightened awareness of worldly joys and beauties, and a piercing melancholy over losing them. He took six verses by Li T'ai-Po and other Chinese poets as texts for tenor, contralto and orchestra, and wrote his farewell in Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), his most personal and by all odds his best work. Scored in a rich, late-romantic idiom...
Probably the last thing Mahler anticipated was that anybody would make a haunting, eloquent ballet out of the piece. Yet that is what British Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, 37, has done. Last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, London's Royal Ballet gave Song its U.S. premiere in a performance that conveyed all the bitter-sweet flavor of Mahler's golden dregs...
...Christmastime, she invites them all in, and "to everyone's annoyance and chagrin, I make mulled wine, all icky and sticky. I'm the only one who likes it." When she can manage to avoid the endless squads of fans, she sneaks off to concerts (preferences: Mahler, Rachmaninoff), but no longer goes to the movies. Instead, for privacy's sake, she runs films in her home-"on the smooth wall of the playroom if it's a good movie, on the brick wall of the living room if it's bad." She cares little...
Opera is enjoyable, she says, "but I could have sung six concerts in the time it took to rehearse Julius Caesar." In a recital, the rich tonalities of her deep velvet voice come to full bloom, lending breadth and a somber ecstasy to a Mahler song, a wry twist to a Hugo Wolf lied...
...Milan's La Scala or West Berlin's opera, whose repertories are laced with contemporary works, the Met, as one critic puts it, "remains a coach-and-four in a jet age." Bing has no desire to stand in the spotlight of the avantgarde. "Remember what Gustav Mahler used to say," he explains: " 'Interesting is easy; beautiful is difficult...