Mahler: Symphony No. 10

Gustav Mahler (Artist), Jesus Lopez-Cobos (Artist), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 28, 2000)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Telarc
• ASIN: B0000516ZJ
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,245 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. I. Adagio

2. II. Scherzo I

3. III. Purgatorio

4. IV. Scherzo II

5. V. Finale

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

With an acclaimed re-recording by Simon Rattle, featuring Deryck Cooke's edition of the score, Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony has clearly gotten a new lease on life. All the more timely, then, for a recording of a completion that's not by Cooke. Remo Mazzetti's involvement goes back over two decades: he completed his first realization in 1989, revising it over the next decade. Those familiar with Cooke will find Mazzetti's perspective altogether more austere, applying considerable restraint in the fleshing-out of detail in Mahler's score, while evoking a more intimate sound world familiar from the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde. The two scherzos often benefit from this lightness of touch, particularly the capricious second movement, but the emotional impact of the outer movements is at times sold short, while the Finale's closing minutes don't have the emotional intensity that Rattle brings to them. Jesús López-Cobos gets alert, sensitive playing from his Cincinnati forces in clean, if small-scale, acoustics. If you already have Rattle, this is worth considering for an alternative view of a fascinating symphonic torso. --Richard Whitehouse

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "To live for you! To die for You!" Mahler's Tenth, January 4, 2001

By 

Thomas F. Bertonneau (Oswego, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Audio CD)

What might have been? Gustav Mahler was only fifty when he died, from heart-failure exacerbated by a throat-infection, in 1911. Under proper treatment, his life would certainly have spanned another decade, maybe two, maybe three. That would have brought him to 1941. What response would World War I have elicited from him, what response events in Germany and Austria beginning in 1933? Would he have come again to America, as Alma did? Or perhaps to Great Britain? Allowing for the best, he would assuredly have extended his canon of symphonies, completing the orchestration of the Tenth and launching thereafter into worlds unknown. Appreciative of science and technique (see Kurt Blaukopf's biography), he might well have embraced the recording studio. Electrical recording would have enabled him to make permanent documents of his own work. In fact, he died young, leaving the score of the Tenth incomplete in its orchestration. Only the opening Adagio reached performance, although Ernst Krenek, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and even Dmitri Shostakovich considered following up Mahler's annotations for the full partitur thus rendering all five movements playable in concert. None could fulfill the challenge, leaving it to an Englishman, Deryck Cooke, to finish the job around 1960. Even then, and for some time, Mahler's widow forbade performance of the work. Hearing a tape of rehearsals, she relented, and the Tenth found its first public in London under Berthold Goldschmidt, using Cooke's version of the score, in 1964. Eugene Ormandy and Wynn Morris made early recordings. By now, the Tenth has ensconced itself immovably in the concert programs and many conductors have included it in their tours of the Mahlerian canon. Simon Rattle has recorded it twice. Listeners have had to familiarize themselves with competing fulfillments of the score - Cooke's, Carpenter's, Mazzetti's. Jésus Lopez-Cobos and Telarc bring us a new Tenth, using Mazzetti's edition, with the Cincinnati Symphony. Some ambiguities remain in the Tenth, like the tempi in the First Movement. The score says "Adagio," but Lopez-Cobos takes it rather faster, almost as "Andante non Troppo." (Hermann Scherchen, who played only the First Movement, took it this way.) Lopez-Cobos' timing (22.01 - Rattle in Berlin needs 25.11) affects the balance of the whole work, giving greater prominence to the remaining four movements, with their weird moods. This in turn dispels the tragic character with which Rattle and Chailly imbue the symphony. Dispel the tragedy? It sounds like heresy. Yet, as Cooke points out in his useful notes on the Tenth in "Gustav Mahler: An Introduction To His Music," this final work from the master conforms to his tendency by ending, not in the minor, but in the major. Furthermore, over the last movement, Mahler inscribed the words, "To live for you! To die for you! Alma!" - not a morbid sentiment. "This is not the music of death," Cooke avers, "but... of love. There was still plenty of life left in Mahler when death claimed him." And that describes Lopez-Cobos' treatment throughout, giving the apocalyptic "organ chord" of the "Adagio" (it reappears in the Finale) its appropriate and terrifying emphasis, but otherwise letting the life-affirming elements come to the fore, as in the first of the two Scherzi. Telarc has produced a number of impressive Mahler discs, including two Ninths, one with Lopez-Cobos and the other with Benjamin Zander, both impressive. So too is this Tenth impressive, not for taxing us with Angst but for illuminating the moments of hope and reconciliation in this important modern score. Telarc's engineers create a fine, translucent recording, and the Cincinnatians play superbly.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A new angle on Mahler 10, February 12, 2002

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Audio CD)

The plethora of Mahler Tenths by now available proves how hard it is to live with the unfulfilled promise of yet another work of genius. Though many conductors and listeners have qualms about tampering with Mahler's sketches, completing Mahler's tenth has branched into a veritable musicological industry. Not only are there several completed versions, there are even several versions of these completions! All these possible permutations allowed by Mahler's outlines seem to me the ultimate tribute to his unique and versatile genius; at the same time they prove conclusively that nobody but he could truly finish the work.
The Cooke edition, not a completion but a 'realization', remains of course paramount. The austerity resulting from its spare textures lend it an appropriately otherworldly, shadowy atmosphere missing in other editions: truly music from beyond the grave. But then again, it is not what Mahler intended to be played. So for all of us who want to hear an echo of an inkling of a suggestion of a conjecture of what it might just possibly have sounded like, maybe, had Mahler indeed lived to finish it, bring in the Carpenters, Wheelers and Mazzetti's.
On this Telarc disc the Cincinnati orchestra under Lopez-Cobos has recorded the second edition of Mazzetti's version. It is definitely an improvement over his earlier attempt, which was grossly over-orchestrated and sounded curiously like a concerto for bass drum. In this version on the other hand the textures have a transparency reminiscent of chamber music, and the work doesn't sound nearly as dark and grim as we're used to - at times I was reminded more of the Fourth symphony than of the Ninth. Actually there are moments where I felt Mazzetti had been pruning his work a little too enthusiastically - the cymbal crash crowning the first Scherzo surely would have deserved to stay, wouldn't it?
Tempo's are fairly brisk, taking away some of the mystery. In general it seems to be not only the edition, but also the performance that lends a coziness to the music that is often surprising and refreshing, though not always apt: the spine-chillingly sinister 'danse macabre' at the end of Scherzo II sounds just too matter-of-fact and flies by in a whiff. On the other hand, the tender resolution of the finale is realized to its full potential, sounding as touching as ever. The absurd drum-roll that destroyed the final ecstatic leap in the earlier edition was wisely deleted in favor of an aptly sonorous chord from the lower brass.
The recording itself is rather dry, giving little sense of acoustic space around the players. At times, especially in fortes involving trumpets, it grows fierce. It is also very close-up and unforgiving, thus unfortunately revealing that the Cincinnati Orchestra is, maybe, not quite a top drawer group. The balance is generally quite good, though the editors occasionally indulge in magnifying solo instruments: the principal cello especially is blown up to giant size. Secondary voices are sometimes too prominent, as if deliberately showing off Mazzetti's clever inventions. In both scherzo's this effect sometimes clouds the sense of musical direction, resulting in a somewhat fragmented, even collage-like sound picture. I could not make out if this is also an editing effect, or was intended by the conductor.
Nevertheless this is a very interesting and engrossing release, that no Mahler fan should miss. Irrespective of editions it sheds a new light on the Tenth, showing it as a work preoccupied with life, not death.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cool and Cerebral Take on the 10th, March 10, 2006

By 

Billyjack D'Urberville (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Audio CD)

This new version of Mahler's 10th has the advantage of being cool and cerebral enough that you can listen to it more often and cozy up to it.

I love the original Cooke version by Ormandy but the fact is, its one of the most emotionally wrenching pieces of music I have ever heard to the point I am rarely up to it. Cooke may have had to invent more than current musicologists would permit, but you know its close to dead-on when you get the full Mahlerian wallup. The genesis of this piece in Mahler's late marital crisis is of course well known and I have little doubt in my bones Cooke is as close as you can get to an actual Mahler seance.

But then, as we Mahler fans know and rarely admit except to each other, Mahler can at times be just too much. Which is why we love him after all. But the 10th can push the most devoted afficionado to the wall. So its good to have this almost academic alternative -- and in about as clean and tonally sensitive a recording as you could hope. The Bavarian folk melodies are just plain wonderful. And of course there's plenty of heaviness and angst left to go around -- it can hardly be erased. Just that if you pop this one into your car stereo, you may actually reach your destination refreshed and enlightened.

And of course you can always still pull the Ormandy/Cooke out of the closet at 2 a.m. in a thunderstorm . . . .