Books, Arts & Manners: Recalling Bernstein on Mahler

GUSTAVE Mahler’s contemporaries thought of him as a conductor who wrote music, and to this extent it was true: The orchestra was a partner in his composition, and he knew the plangencies that a solitary horn could utter over the orchestral panoply. In the midst of that sadness—Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois—he could break in with a sadder humor, as in the funeral passages of his first symphony. Leonard Bernstein is another conductor who wrote music—though much of his output gives me the longueurs—so there may have been some logic to his having recorded the entire Mahler oeuvre for Columbia Records.

Bernstein recorded prodigiously, and a hundred of his LP works are being reissued onCDasa Royal Edition. (The royalty is not his but Prince Charles’s, one of whose schoolboy watercolors graces each album.) I have been listening to five Mahler symphonies in this series—Nos. 1, 2, 7, 9, and 10—recorded with the New York Philharmonic. I would not compare them with Bruno Walter’s readings, but I can find no infidelity to what the composer set down. However to get the most out of these scores, there must be absolute precision and a respect for all its voices. Otherwise, the colors seem to run a bit—as they do for Bernstein (Sony Classical SM2K 47573 & SM3K 87484).

RT

About the Author

Ralph de Toledano

Featured Tags

GUSTAVE Mahler’s contemporaries thought of him as a conductor who wrote music, and to this extent it was true: The orchestra was a partner in his composition, and he knew the plangencies that a solitary horn could utter over the orchestral panoply. In the midst of that sadness—Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois—he could break in with a sadder humor, as in the funeral passages of his first symphony. Leonard Bernstein is another conductor who wrote music—though much of his output gives me the longueurs—so there may have been some logic to his having recorded the entire Mahler oeuvre for Columbia Records.

Bernstein recorded prodigiously, and a hundred of his LP works are being reissued onCDasa Royal Edition. (The royalty is not his but Prince Charles’s, one of whose schoolboy watercolors graces each album.) I have been listening to five Mahler symphonies in this series—Nos. 1, 2, 7, 9, and 10—recorded with the New York Philharmonic. I would not compare them with Bruno Walter’s readings, but I can find no infidelity to what the composer set down. However to get the most out of these scores, there must be absolute precision and a respect for all its voices. Otherwise, the colors seem to run a bit—as they do for Bernstein (Sony Classical SM2K 47573 & SM3K 87484).