1. two excerpts from the finale of M2 - one loud and one soft - but not the very ending. I played the loud, brassy excerpt that comes immediately after the soft brass chorale, but before the two big percussion crescendos. That was my personal 'gotch-ya' moment for Mahler's music, clear back in the latter '70s. The other was the very soft presentation of the "Resurrection" theme, just before the mezzo sings "O glaube, mein Herz, O glaube". I feel that that is a particularly beautiful moment! I used the Litton/Dallas/Delos recording because it has lots of extra tracks in the finale.
2. "Revelge" and "Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht" from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn". I used the Boulez/DG recording with Gerharer and Kozena.
3. Because of the col legno technique near the end of "Revelge", we had our 'house violinist' (he works part-time in the cafe) give an example of striking the strings with the back of the bow (col legno). Then he played the two short violin solos from the first movement of M3 (the second one is actually a 'dovetailing' duet between solo horn and solo violin; just before the development section).
4. On cassette tape (but played through the house stereo system), we played a comparison between the, "Battle with the Rat King" from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker", and the "southern strom" fantasy passage from the development section of M3/1 (before the reiteration of the symphony's opening horn fanfare). For the "southern storm" I used Honeck/P.S.O./Exton.
5. the finale from M4 with Miah Persson/I. Fischer/B.F.O. on Channel Classics (text were handed out for all three vocal excerpts). Persson does a fabulous job on that movement.
6. the 'Alpine' passage from the Andante Moderato movement of M6, located about 6.5 minutes into it. Boulez/VPO/DG. I also brought my medium size cow bell, which someone played from the distance (for comedic effect).
7. we ended with the fourth movement (2nd Nachtmusik) from M7 with MTT/SFSO. I would normally would have used Zinman for that movement, but we had Howard Kadis on hand. Howard played the mandolin on all three MTT/SFSO Mahler recordings that do employ mandolin (M7, M8, and "DLvdE"). Thus, we used the MTT/SFSO recording of M7. Howard sounds really good in that movement, by the way. I like for that movement to go a tad faster than MTT takes it (Zinman), but it's not bad by any means.
If there had been more time, I would have liked to have played the centrally placed, slow, 'moonlit' passage from the first movement of M7 (Zinman does it fabulously), as well as the very beginning of "der Abschied" from "DLvdE". I would have used the new Graf/Houston S.O./Naxos recording of "Das Lied" because there's plenty of tam-tam at the start of VI.
With talking between the excerpts, that all took up plenty of time as it was.
Topic: Reminder to anyone in Berkely, Ca area: Mahlerabend at The M.O. is tomorrow nigh (Read 4831 times)