I've just been listening to a searing performance of Mahler 9 by the BPO, Claudio Abbado, as recommended in last Saturday''s "Building a Library".

I only left my chair to collect a package from the postie which, fortuitously, turned out to be the DVD of Mahler 2, performed by Staatskapelle Berlin, Pierre Boulez, on 26 March 2005.   Soloists Diana Damrau and Petra Lang with the choir der Deutschen Staatsoper Berlin.  A highly promising treat which must wait until the memory of symphony No 9 subsides.

Wolfgang Stahr's notes refer to the performance as a "Homage to Pierre Boulez" to celebrate his 80th birthday and how the admiration of the audience that had come to celebrate his birthday knew no bounds.       "It is difficult to regard Pierre Boulez as an 'old man'," wrote Wolfgang Schreiber in the Suddeutsche Zeitung.       "Anyone seeing him walk to the podium with his rapid, sprightly steps and noting not only his physical and emotional commitment to the music but the alertness with which he follows an extremely complex score and his ability to communicate the music's structures and his own wishes to a body of players through the power of suggestion alone would think that this amazing man was an eternally youthful sixty-year old".......

Boulez himself elegantly and wittily refutes the persistent reproach that he is above all a cool intellectual and a sober analyst:   "Analysis is merely a preliminary stage, a preparation," he explains.  "An interpretation is not a demonstration.   I don't demonstrate vacuum cleaners.  You first have to have clear ideas.   After that you can be spontaneous.   True spontaneity follows on from analysis.".........

Herr Stahr continues,  In answer to the provocative question whether one has to be eighty to understand Mahler, Boulez replies:  "I conducted a lot of Mahler forty years ago in London as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra - but not in Germany.    For my own part, I discovered Mahler's music in 1958 - through his songs.   Out of consideration for the voice, Mahler's orchestration is far lighter and more sophisticated in his songs than it is in his symphonies."        Boulez sees Mahler the symphonist as a figure caught between two eras, a subversive with reverentially conservative ambitions.   Writing in the wake of Berlioz and Wagner, Mahler expanded the traditional form of the symphony and turned it into a kind of "theatre of the mind", a novel-like narrative, while nonetheless sticking unwaverlingly to the ideal of greatness and wholeness - in this regard he was also acting in conscious opposition to the morbidezza of the end of the 19th century.   "For me, Mahler's music is closely bound up with that of Alban Berg," admits Boulez,  "there's the same feeling in both, the only difference being that Berg used a new vocabulary, whereas we can also listen to Mahler with the ears of the 19th century without feeling unduly disturbed.   I think that Mahler tried to create a unity where none existed any longer."

This sense of a creative contradiction is further reflected in the tortuous compositional history of the Second Symphony, with its frequent changes of direction.............."

Time to think-on as I do some gardening.

The DVD is coded Region O, and I got my copy from the river, over the pond, for 33 US dollars, including shipping.  EuroArts  2054418

I think Boulez (and, for that matter, many other great Mahler interpreters - the list of those who do play a completion of the completed 10th is shorter and, frankly, less illustrious, than those who don't) is quite correct. I've got 4 different recordings of the Cooke edition, and one of the Wheeler and none of them has convinced me of the merits of the endeavour. For me, Mahler's particular genius was for orchestration, so to try and orchestra his work is, somewhat futile. The results of these completions never sound, to me, at any rate, like genuine Mahler. Of course, I appreciate the argument (and Cooke himself admitted he wasn't capable, or trying to, recreate Mahler), that this is merely a means of making the sketches performable by an orchestra, but that only underscores my objection - that Mahler's great skill lay in that realisation.

But then, as a general rule, I'm no big fan of completions anyway and find them to be, at best, interesting curiousities.

Bryn, I wasn't meaning to denigrate Gielen (I haven't got round to hearing his Mahler recordings, so I can't comment one way or the other). I simply meant that, taken as a whole, the list of conductors who don't (or didn't) play the completions was more impressive: Bernstein, Walter, Barbirolli, Haitink, Solti, Abbado, Tennstedt (just off the top of my head).

Further to my posting, #228, enthusiasts of Zinman/Zurich Tonhalle Orch, may be interested to know that their CD recordings of Mahler Symphonies 1 and 2 are also available from the river, over the Pond, for a joint offer price of 37.45 US dollars, incl shipping.

ha! surprise surprise...

how is cookes edition of Mahlers 10th at the thinner end of the repertoire??
how??

It is a sketch, elaborated by a second party, assisted by others. Cooke and others have provided 'performing versions' of it.