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 advocate, in no small part due to the consonances between their professional lives – Mahler preceded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, and both enjoyed great success as conductors but faced critical disparagement of their compositions. Both men also had rich but conflicted encounters with their mutual given religion, Judaism.
Musically, Bernstein’s ability to extend the emotional intensity of the orchestras he conducted made him an intriguing interpreter of the hyper-expressive sound world of Mahler. Here is an excerpt of Bernstein rehearsing the Fifth Symphony with another of Mahler’s orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic, and searching for that special ‘Mahler Klang.’
