I'm convinced it's wrong. Mahler just doesn't do that. (IMHO... I have a facsimile of the manuscript at home - once I'm back from Warsaw I'll check to see if that offers any additional evidence.)

There's an analogous thing which used to afflict recordings of the 9th. Mahler didn't normally write a semibreve with a tremolo sign; instead he wrote minims because they have tails you can put tremolo strokes through. Thus you have a few moments in the Rondo-Burleske where the winds go to great lengths to bring out these minims. Pedantry, I calls it. And at the same time just wrong.

SusanDoris: I echo Ron's delight and proffer my congratulations. What wonderfully open ears you have! If only all listeners were like you...

Baritone horn, please.

Me too. But I wonder why someone with the interpretative depth and intelligence of Gielen would think he did (don't know if I'd necessarily apply that description to Barenboim). Maybe he has some source of information that we don't. But I would imagine that if Mahler wanted such an unusual effect he would have drawn attention to it in the notation. I haven't heard the Seventh from Walter or any other first-generation Mahlerians - maybe the answer lies there.

However. Gielen's Mahler is a wonderful thing, I think, on the basis of this one piece admittedly but it's a hard one to get right.

Very nice to hear SusanDoris's Shostakovich report too. For me, though, the real Cinderella of the series is the 12th, which to me really does suffer from all the faults that DSCH-detractors hear in all his work.

Sadly, I have to agree with you. It has its moments, yet, but overall it comes across as rather contrived and uncommitted, which is pretty unusual for Shostakovich. In an odd kind of way, it gives me a not dissimilar feeling to that which I get from listening to his compatriot Medtner's Piano Quintet, a work that occupied him on and off for some 45 years and in which I fear his faith as one of the pinnacles of his achievement was sadly misplaced because, to me, it seems almost as though he'd finally gotten so sick and tired of being called the "Russian Brahms" that he thought "OK, well, if that's what you must have from me, then that's what you'll get!". Yes, it's a fine work on its own terms but it seems to me to be far from Medtner at his best.

Shostakovich soon made up for this temporarily-out-of-service symphony, though (sadly, Medtner did not survive to do the same).

Best,

Alistair

Great to hear that the piece takes your interest! That recording, by the Wyttenbachs, is the only I haven't heard - could anyone who knows both that and the various others (Kontarskys, Mikhashoff/Bevan, Corver/Grotemius (my personal favourite)) comment on how it compares, what the differences are? Also, can anyone tell me anything more about Jurg Wyttenbach's own music, which I've heard recommended to me, but I don't think ever heard a note of?

Susan, hello again.

Your question about the various interpretations of the second symphony, and whether they differ much is a really interesting one, to which the answer is an emphatic 'yes'. Right from the highly experimental opening (which some conductors portray as an impressionist wash of sound while others strive to make each of the overlapping strands as clear as possible) to the choral finale, there are huge differences. In one recording (not yours) the chorus is numerically weak, and musically fearfully overparted: in others there are huge choruses which are magnificent, and even little details such as the shouted slogans at the end elicit wildly differing responses, from the searingly fervent to the frankly embarrassed. The pitched siren requested in the score doesn't appear in any of the recordings, though not all use the specified alternative trombones: at least three use an organ, and I have a feeling that one uses a recording of a siren along with the trombones.

The most recent recording I've laid my hands on is a Russian radio live performance from the 1960s, which positively blazes. Russian orchestras then still had a very particular colour, which would be the colour that Shostakovich no doubt expected, and the choral sound is big, bold and just rough enough to give it character, whilst the frankly second-rate political clap-trap of a poem is delivered as if every singer believes every word of it. It's one of the few recordings in which it becomes truly apparent in the choral finale that Shostakovich was heavily in thrall to Mahler, which on the other hand makes the experimental nature of the first half of the piece seem stranger still: but we have to remember that the composer was a very young man and the work was written at a point before there were stipulations from on high regarding what Soviet composers could (and couldn't) do, and that he seems to have been given carte blanche to be daring and innovative.

Best wishes,

Ron

Who is claiming that? Whether the sextuplets themselves should sound more like an unmeasured tremolo rather than a clearly marked series of individuated sextuplets is another matter, of course....

I'm totally confused now, martle. Is that you, or is the chorister you've just posted on the 'Perfect pitch' thread you?