This week our music director is in Boston filling in for an ailing James Levine, and he’s conducting Mahler’s mighty Seventh Symphony. (Which will be streamed live on the internet at 7:00 p.m. EDT on April 10, 2010 – look for the “Listen Live” box on the left side of the site).
I’m very jealous. I’m also anxiously awaiting the OSO’s symphony of the season, this year it being the Symphony No. 1 “Titan”. I can’t wait!
Meanwhile, here’s a tasty bit of virtuoso playing from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado.
and here is the La Scala Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel doing the finale from Mahler’s First Symphony:
5 replies on “itching for mahler”
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Titan – a daunting piece. But got to love the viola “solo” 🙂
Mahler 7 was the the real beginning of my awakening as a musician. It still holds a really dear spot in my heart, and watching that performance was such a lift, Charles! I still can’t get over how frail Abbado looks, but *man* can that orchestra play! Thanks for posting…
I think this performance was after he came back from his cancer surgery and treatment – I think he’s doing better these days!
Here’s an example of the type of “criticism” Mahler had to put up with in his time:
“If Mahler’s music would speak Yiddish, it would be perhaps unintelligible to me. But it is repulsive to me because it ACTS Jewish. This is to say that it speaks musical German, but with an accent, with an inflection, and above all, with the gestures of an eastern, all too eastern Jew. So, even to those whom it does not offend directly, it can not possibly communicate anything. One does not have to be repelled by Mahler’s artistic personality in order to realize the complete emptiness and vacuity of an art in which the spasm of an impotent mock-Titanism reduces itself to the frank gratification of common seamstress-like sentimentality.”
– Rudolf Lewis, Die Deutsche Musik der Gegenwart, Munich, 1909.
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this dazzling bit of anti-Semitism was found in Nicolas Slonimsky’s essential book, “Lexicon of Musical Invective.”