Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 10 in F-Sharp (edited by Remo Mazzetti, Jr.) ~ Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra / Slatkin

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a really engaging performance. Even if you have a few other recordings of this work, this is worht getting because of the bonus disc. On the bonus disc Slatkin talks about the different performing editions of the 10th and the SLSO plays some examples. This was very enlightening to me. Usually, with a work like a Mahler Symphony, we compare recordings and make our choices based on how the conductor handled the score. In this case, it is not just that, but Slatkin takes us through the process of choosing which score to play.

If you are serious about this symphony, I would say to get a recording of the Deryk Cooke version, and also this record, and compare.

Okay, we all realize that reviews can be quite subjective. I just can't help saying that this performance sounds just like what Mahler intended. (I realize that sounds presumptuous of me, but Mahler is my favorite composer, and I have listened to nearly every available performance of everything he wrote.) This sounds like vintage Mahler. It's spellbinding. I felt as if Mahler had come back from the grave to direct this beautiful, moving performance.

Mahler never finished his tenth symphony, but he did leave some pretty good outlines of what he intended. The trick is choosing the orchestration: which instruments play each theme. Several people have attempted to go on from the outlines and prepare performing versions of Mahler's 10th. American Remo Mazzetti, Jr. produced this version, performed here by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Compared to other versions (by Cooke, Carpenter, and Wheeler) this version just sounds more like Mahler: there is the bigger than life Mahler sound, presented on a grander scale. There is more emphasis to the horns and timpani, especially in the second movement. There is simply a better choice of instruments and combinations of instruments to sing the various Mahler themes. The whole symphony is full of warmth, forboding, pain, love, and drama, and ends in a sweet and peaceful exit from life.

I apologize for getting so passionate about this, but it was as if Mahler had guided Mazzetti's pen and Slatkin's baton to see that his unfinished symphony was set forth as a fitting gift to us, nearly a century after his death.

I find this disc to be a revelation, especially after hearing a pile of dead-boring 10ths. The playing alone (as is often the case with St. Louis) warrants at least a serious listen, if not the price of the disc. The first movement climax, with one incredible trumpet blast that seems to stretch for infinity is just incredible. However, if you like late Bernstein (agogic and grotesquely self-indulgent) Mahler (or more appropriate, Mahler-Bernstein), you should forego this disc. Slatkin cares much more about presenting Mahler as Mahler, and not Mahler as edited by Slatkin.

I have been going through all of the four major completions of Mahler's tragically unfinished 10th symphony. I came across them in this order - Wheeler, Cooke, Mazzetti, and I'm awaiting the arrival of my Carpenter version. I fell in love right away with the Wheeler recording (my first hearing of the symphony) - it wasn't till several months later that I stumbled upon a Cooke version (Inbal's) and gave it a whirl. Right away I noticed the fuller sound in many portions where Wheeler had purposefully left things bare. However, I was not too impressed with the poor recording quality of the Inbal performance (too much room noise for my taste, especially as this was supposedly a studio recording).

Well, since I am a completist, I ordered this disc of the Mazzetti for my collection. When I first listened through it, I almost took it out and chucked it without finishing! It was drastically different enough to shock me (particularly the 4th movement and parts of the 5th). However, I then listened to Slatkin's explanatory disc (about a 15 - 20 minute discussion of each completion including samples of the same passages from all four composers and descriptions of the differences) - for whatever reason, after listening to that and then giving the Mazzetti completion another whirl, it almost instantly became my favorite! Now, I understand Carpenter took the most liberties with the score and added much of his own style which was distinctly un-Mahler - so, I've yet to hear his version, but the clips played by Slatkin sounded a little too over the top to be taken as anything more than an "interesting alternative" to what Mahler intended.

Mazzetti likely took his own liberties (the consensus seems to indicate that Wheeler left it the barest and closest not only to the original notes, but also to the style Mahler had adapted in his final symphonies). Even so, I like Mazzetti's ideas - whether or not it is Mahlerian, I cannot say, but it sure makes the piece sound more complete and fleshed out - it was beautiful to begin with, but now it brings tears to the eyes! Not only is it a great interpretation, but the recording is near flawless - particularly impressive if it was indeed recorded in live sessions as Slatkin indicates.

This is a great package, along with the bonus disc. A steal at any price, to be sure!

Although this version of the symphony (and the performance) have a great deal to recommend throughout, the thing that stands out for me is that Mazzetti, unlike Wheeler, Cooke, and Carpenter, has managed to create a finale worthy of the rest of the symphony--and of Mahler! I have been listening to the five-movement version of this work since the Ormandy recording came out in 1966, and have heretofore always been a bit disappointed in the final movement. But to me, Mazzetti has created a version that contains the emotional turns and transitions, the telling orchestral details, that I like to believe Mahler would have created if he had lived. Mazzetti may also have done the best version of the second movement, though most of the orchestrators have done well with it. For the "Purgatorio," I would recommend both this and the Cooke versions (preferably in one of Simon Rattle's performances); they are highly fascinating and quite different. (I regard this as one of the best under-five-minute pieces of music ever written, along with the Mozart/Tchaikovsky Gigue from the "Mozartiana" suite, and Stravinsky's "Fireworks.")

This CD was eagerly awaited by Mahler fans a few years ago, because it featured the world premiere recording of a new performing edition of the 10th. Slatkin had been performing Mazzetti's version in concerts, and as a bonus to purchasers of this CD, he recorded a lecture with musical examples to illustrate the differences among various performing editions of the work. With the 10th captured on one silver disk and the lecture disk thrown in at no extra cost, this new RCA release was a decent bargain, and both RCA and Slatkin deserved appreciation for presenting such a fine and complete package to the public at a reasonable price.

However, it is now difficult to recommend this disk, mainly because Mazzetti has since withdrawn the version of the score that was recorded by Slatkin, replacing it with a newer version that has been recorded recently by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on Telarc (reviewed below). In addition, Slatkin is a bit too much like Haitink for my taste in Mahler conductors (i.e., too prone to smooth things out), and I miss the energy that Simon (now Sir Simon) Rattle brings to his recordings of the Cooke edition of the score on EMI. For the Mazzetti version, the new Telarc release reviewed below is better in every way than this version from RCA.

Still, for devoted Mahler fans, Slatkin's lecture disk makes this release worth seeking out, and the performance of the now-withdrawn Mazzetti version is certainly worth hearing.

Having been accustomed to Cooke's version of Mahler's 10th and the benchmark recording of it by Ormandy (Mahler - Symphony No 10), I had some difficulty to appreciate this recording of Mazzetti's reconstruction. However, after reading booklet commentary on the history of how reconstruction came about and Slatkin's enlightening lecture, comparing actual orchestra quotations from Carpenter, Mazzetti, Cooke and Wheeler's versions, I've gradually begun to see the ingenuity and the beauty of Mazzetti's reconstruction. Notably, the three inner movements are very different from Cooke's version, far more complex in structure and richer in colour. After repeated listening, I've come to a conclusion that Mazzetti's reconstruction sounds far richer and more Mahlerian in the sense that added meaty parts sound almost as if composed by Mahler himself, while Cooke's version is indispensable as a most faithful reconstruction even though it lacks Mahlerian grandeur and complexity.

As for the performance itself, I found it shame that Slatkin lets intensity level suddenly drop in crucial moments, notably in the first movement, and I don't agree with him about some strange things he does in climactic moments, but this is a monumental effort by the conductor, nonetheless, realising the incredibly powerful performance of epic stature for the first time, which can matches grandeur of other Mahler Symphonies like 2nd, 3rd and 8th.

Like his outstanding Telarc recording of the Resurrection Symphony Mahler - Symphony No 2, Slatkin's account of the 10th has gritty, labouring quality and it is thickly painted with much emphasis on brass and inner parts of counterpoint. That works wonder in the complex three inner movements. The climaxes in the first and the last movement are explosive and overwhelming.

Overall it makes for an highly engaging listening experience together with Slatkin's insightful demonstrations of how the orchestra sounds with each version (on disc 2). It is a welcome addition to M10 discography as there are very few good recordings of the work yet.

As you can see above, Leonard Slatkin has included a second disc in this package exclusively devoted to explaining Mahler's 10th, and playing a few cuts from the Mazzetti, and other performing versions of the tenth. Mazzetti clearly has a keen understanding of Mahler, and his ideas on orchestrating music. But, once again, Leonard Slatkin's haphazard, perfunctory approach to delivering his interpretations borders on annoying. This man simply cannot stop and smell the flowers during his performances. I would give the "explanation" disc five stars, but the implementation of those ideas falls disappointingly short.

When Leonard Slatkin released this performance of the Mahler Tenth as completed by Remo Mazzetti, only the original one by Deryck Cooke had been recorded. The Cooke Tenth, which won almost universal praise, was a faithful scholarly document of Mahler's sketches with very few additions of Cooke's own. The symphony's skeleton is fleshed out enough so that great performances of that version sound movingly like Mahler. I'm thinking of outstanding recordings by James Levine, Riccardo Chailly, and Simon Rattle in his remake from Berlin.

Slatkin isn't a conductor of their stature, and that hurts here, because any completion needs inspired conducting to get over the rough spots and bare patches where Mahler left only a two-stave piano score. But I doubt that the greatest reading on earth would have done much for Mazzetti's hodgepodge, which he cobbled together from other completions by Wheeler, Carpenter, and Cooke. Unfortunately for us all, Carpenter decided to channel the dead composer and added many new things "intuitively" into the score. These very bad ideas are duplicated here, including a coarse thickening of the orchestration, alongside scraps of academic counterpoint that stop the music dead. The cannon-like thwacks on the bass durm which begin the finale are vulgar and absurd.

There's a reason why no one in the past decade has given Mazzetti's Mahler Tenth a second try on CD.