Record of the day: Gustav Mahler, “10 Symphonien”
Gustav Mahler
“10 Symphonien” (13 Cd DG B000001GFS)
«It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of Holocausts all over the world… that we can finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that he foresaw everything; in the fulfillment of this prophecy he had poured out upon the world a river of beauty that no one has equaled since.”
These words by Leonard Bernstein, one of the greatest interpreters of the Austrian composer, demonstrate the intense bond that the American conductor had with Mahler, of whom he was one of the avid supporters in the years in which the fame of this musician was linked to having been a great conductor, while his music was considered by critics and musicologists to be banal, vulgar and irrelevant.
He was the first to make the first complete recording (for Columbia) of all the Symphonies between 1960 and 1968; thanks to his wonderful interpretations, Bernstein was one of the standard bearers of Mahlerian rediscovery and his identification with the composer (also thanks to their common Jewish faith) has become increasingly profound over the years.
Bernstein was also a prophet in understanding that Mahler’s music contained within it universes of poetry, anguish, suffering and spiritual redemption, summing up (as Schönberg understood very well) the extreme poetic inspiration of the nineteenth century and at the same time pointing out the way to twentieth-century adventures.
Often hypertrophic in orchestral compositions and durations, Mahlerian symphonies draw on almost unimaginable expressive depths, welcoming the legacy of the great German symphonic tradition but re-proposing it through a visionary sound that explores orchestral possibilities in every smallest detail, opening up to new orchestration solutions and hitherto unheard of color combinations.
If the cycle of Symphonies recorded by Bernstein for Columbia was imbued with the exuberance that marked each of his recordings of those
years, the last series of recordings made for DG a few months before his death is of a profoundly different nature; much more relaxed and elastic tempos, a more composite timbral sensitivity and in general a vision of moving, almost otherworldly intensity of the music with which Bernstein, once again embracing his friend Mahler, signed his own spiritual testament.
Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.
This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.
