Gustav Mahler's American Years, 1907-1911: A Documentary History (Monographs in Musicology)
Entartete Musik (Free subscription) | 02/09/2010
Tonight, the Elias Quartet will perform two of Schubert's most melancholic works at Wigmore Hall, the 'Rosamunde' Quartet and the String Quintet. Both pieces, while written at the height of the composer's creative powers (the quartet in the spring of 1824, the quintet in the autumn of 1828), cannot hide a profound sense of unease with the world. Balancing attack with resignation is absolutely key to...
Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks (Free subscription) | 02/06/2010
Mahler made his way to the Hilbert Circle Theater, and now he's en route to Butler University , for their Midwinter Dance Festival. Anthony Tudor's ballet, Dark Elegies , set to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder will be performed Feb. 12 and 13, at 8pm, Clowes Memorial Hall. You can get your tickets here.
Clef Notes (Free subscription) | 02/05/2010
The Peabody Symphony Orchestra was scheduled to perform a program of Mahler, Schwantner and more Saturday night. That event, like so many others, has now been canceled in anticipation of the meteorological horror due any minute now. However, there's a...
Entartete Musik (Free subscription) | 02/04/2010
Music and Madness in Mahler's Vienna A TALK BY GAVIN PLUMLEY 9th March 2010 - 7pm at The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3 5SX Introduced and chaired by Anthony Cantle 100 years ago this summer, Gustav Mahler saw Sigmund Freud for a one-off consultation in the Dutch town of Leiden. Mahler had just discovered that his wife, Alma, was having an affair and was encouraged by her to seek...
Violinist.com (Free subscription) | 02/01/2010
By Pauline Lerner: The Grammy award winners for 2009 have just been announced. Here are some of the award winning classical music albums. For complete details, see the Grammy site . The nominees are interesting, and they are listed on the same site. Best classical album: Mahler: Symphony No. 8; Adagio From Symphony No. 10, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Best orchestral...
ArtsJournal (Free subscription) | 02/01/2010
Michael Tilson Thomas's recording of Mahler's 8th Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony won three trophies, including Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance. Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto was named best contemporary composition, while David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion took the small ensemble performance prize. James Levine and the Boston Symphony, guitarist Sharon Isbin, soprano...
The Classical Beat (Free subscription) | 02/01/2010
Two years ago, I wrote an article on how irrelevant the Grammy Awards are to classical music (you could think of it as a companion piece to the article I did this past weekend on classical music and the Billboard charts). So it is no surprise that the winners of the Grammy Awards in classical music on Sunday night seem such a poor reflection of the field at large. The awards seem, as usual, to be based...
Clef Notes (Free subscription) | 01/27/2010
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will return to Carnegie Hall next season with music director Marin Alsop for two programs in November. The first will include Mahler's controversial reorchestration of Beethoven's "Eroica" (Mahler introduced his touched-up Beethoven scores to Carnegie Hall...
Classical Iconoclast (Free subscription) | 01/27/2010
Today marks the liberation of Auschwitz, but Holocaust Day commemorates all people destroyed in that madness, and by extension, those destroyed in other madnesses. I steeled myself to watch the propaganda movie made in Theresienstadt, to show the world what a "fun" place it was. There are shots of obviously urban people merrily digging vegetable plots, looking healthily suntanned and smiling....
From Beyond the Stave (Free subscription) | 01/26/2010
Born out of papers presented at a study day in April 2008, Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work is a fascinating volume. Edited by Lucy Walker, it represents the most recent work in Britten scholarship, covering such areas as musical and non-musical influences on the composer (as varied as Ovid, the cinema and Shostakovich), studies of individual works, and a discussion of a work...
Berkshire Review for the Arts (Free subscription) | 01/26/2010
Mr. Zander, who leads the Boston Philharmonic, has leveraged his considerable communication and educational skills into creating something beyond the mere making of music. Here is the latest on the Berkshire Review for the Arts. Click on the headings to visit the site and read the full articles.
Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks (Free subscription) | 01/22/2010
I've loved Wikipedia for a long time, but now I've found another site I love even more: Uncyclopedia. The entry for Gustav Mahler is one of the funniest things I've ever read as well. Here are a few of my favorites: In describing his 6th symphony, it says "Symphony No. 6 , “Angsty,” for orchestra, cowbell, and OMFG scary hammer. Order of the movements may change without notice"...
Slipped disc (Free subscription) | 01/15/2010
Starting Mahler year tomorrow on BBC Radio 3, I am giving a short talk, Why Mahler?, which is also the title of my forthcoming book, and the working title of a documnetary I am making. Here's the url of tomorrow's...
Entartete Musik (Free subscription) | 01/15/2010
Echoing the music of the past, while contemplating his ambivalence to the present and an uncertainty of the future, Mahler's symphonies are epic statements of man in the world. The Hallé/BBC Phil Mahler seems to be getting the majority of the Mahler attention in the Press. Michael Kennedy's piece this week in the Spectator fails to mention the Liverpool cycle entirely. To recap, Vasily Petrenko...
Messages from the Ether (Free subscription) | 01/14/2010
Almost a year ago, I got the itch to hear some orchestral song cycles and backburnered the task to find some recordings. It took this long. These are my first MP3 purchases from Amazon. The Mahler recording has a lot of distortion (at least, it does on my crappy PC speakers that otherwise sound "good enough"). The Canteloube and Glazunov don't have this problem. The Glazunov symphonies I...
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