November 2009
10 posts
5 tags
Mahler month → The ringtone
Gustav Mahler, writing to his wife Alma in October 1904 after an early rehearsal of his Fifth Symphony, described the Scherzo as ‘this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, these dancing stars, these breathtaking, iridescent and flashing breakers.’ Now one more item can be added to Mahler’s list - this cellphone ringtone!
Click to listen →
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6 tags
Mahler month → The trauermarsch
‘Measured. Severe. Like a funeral procession.’
Gustav Mahler’s tempo indication for the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.
Mahler - Symphony no. 5, Trauermarsch WCFSO – November 2009
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Mahler month → The performer
The final sounding in my series of posts leading up to tomorrow’s WCFSO performance of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony comes from the man himself. On November 9, 1905 Mahler visited the Welte & Sohne studios in Leipzig and recorded several piano rolls of his own music using the Welte-Mignon system; the rolls from that day are the only audio documentation of Mahler’s approach...
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Mahler month → The interpretation
Gustav Mahler’s music is notoriously challenging for performers and listeners alike, and during and after his lifetime his symphonies and song cycles met with coolness and even hostility from both groups. Over the course of the twentieth century a number of committed performers helped to spark a wider embrace of his music among orchestras and audiences.
Leonard Bernstein was Mahler’s most notable...
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Mahler month → The t-shirt
The entire WCFSO viola section showed up to rehearsal the other night wearing these:
Who’s stoked for Saturday night?
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Mahler month → The manuscript
One of the people who encouraged my interest in the music and life of Gustav Mahler is Gilbert Kaplan, a prominent businessman who has a singular passion for the composer. In addition to his career as a publisher Kaplan is a serious collector of Mahler-related documents and has published a variety of recordings, books and other material through his Kaplan Foundation, including the marvelous...
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(Mis)understanding Mahler →
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Mahler month → The interviews
This blog is a 21st-century conductor’s perspective on orchestral music. So what better way for me to broaden my ongoing consideration of the music of Gustav Mahler than to bring in the voices of other contemporary conductors?
View at Vimeo →
The music publisher Universal Edition has recorded a series of videos with leading conductors discussing their connections to...
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Mahler month → The circle
By the time he began work on the Fifth Symphony in 1901 Mahler was becoming increasingly involved with a circle of pioneering modernist artists organized around the Vienna Secession. That year he courted Alma Schindler, daughter of one of the group’s founders, Karl Moll. Mahler’s closest artistic collaborator at the Court Opera, stage designer Alfred Roller, was also a member of the...
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Mahler month → The city
Over the next several weeks I’ll be devoting my posts to Gustav Mahler and his Fifth Symphony, ahead of a special presentation of that work at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony. The starting point is Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, site of a complex nexus of art and politics and home to some of the world’s most sophisticated music making. The city’s most closely...