Thanks for the comments everybody!
As far as the orchestra goes: here in the Netherlands we have both a long Mahler tradition and also lots of fairly good student orchestras, which means that most of the people in this video have already played several Mahler symphonies and have a huge amount of orchestral experience. This particularly orchestra (
www.ricciotti.nl , I don't seem to be able to find the hyperlink button) is very special in that it has only 40 players, doesn't need chairs or concert clothes and has a special instrumentation, so we can literally run out of our tour bus and play anywhere we want in under three minutes (the record was set at 2:12 a few projects ago, including putting up percussion
). We play everywhere for everyone, and gave more than 20 concerts in six days on this tour. Some places we played where: a juvenile correctional facility, old peoples' homes, some pulbic squares where the police kicked us out, a university canteen etc. etc. The footage was taken on the last tour day, and we were all dressed up for no reason
I'm the double bass player wearing the bunny ears
We talked about the circumstances under which Mahler wrote his tenth, and we discussed the various outcries he had written in the short score (O God why have you abandoned me etc.). I do feel it sometimes helps when people know what the music is about, altough wearing little butterfly wings (the cello's) when playing Purgatorio perhaps kinda defeated the purpose sometimes
. There were also a lot of jokes about cheating made by our announcer, before we played. Everybody can relate to that.
OK guys, here follows some boring technical stuff for the people who really care
You can indeed hear an alto saxophone at the end: Mahler didn't actually specify instrumentation for the last couple of bars, and I had to keep the piece interesting for all the players so...
. She also plays the viola part (again, not really specified by Mahler in these three bars) in bar
89-91, altough they're not really in time on this recording. The soprano saxophone sometimes doubles as second trumpet, and also has part of the oboe solo in the reprise, starting at bar
144. Most of the difficulties in the rest of the piece were in choosing what to do when Mahler wrote a chord for 3 trombones, clarinets or whatever, when you only have one or two. This was mostly taken over by horns, bassoons etc. The stopped horns actually cheated a little bit I think
. I wrote down Mahler's notes but the 2nd voice was too low for the player to make a good sound, so she transposed it one octave higher. O well, nice solution.
Initially I tried something new in bars
70-73: Mahler is very unclear about instrumentation here and my idea was to have oboes in combination with saxophones or something like that play the melody, and the trumpet joining in for the crescendo in
bar 73. I was overruled here on grounds of range of the trumpet when the conductor asked for an Eb instrument instead of a C. Perhaps for the best, but now it did end up being very much like Cooke's version.
That's one thing about the entire orchestration by the way: I tried my best to first and foremost follow Mahler's sketches, and that way I ended up with a version that doesn't differ that much on first sight with Cooke's version, because he also worked that way. I tried to make this version of Mahler as much my own unique one as possible, but in the end, because Mahler specified so much in his sketches, there are thousands of small differences between my version and others, and very few major ones.
Barry, thank you for your suggestions! The tam-tam glissando was indeed at least subconciously inspired by the Sacre
. It was also the last thing I added before we printed the music. They hired a tam-tam specially for this piece on a tour with 24 other pieces, so I was very proud they took the trouble. Incidentally, other special instruments on this tour included rainsticks, electric guitar and...... bicycle bells. Dutch orchestra's, go figure;)
I see what you mean by using the tam-tam in a few other places.
Bar 97 could indeed be very beautifull, like Mahler's 4th, 2nd movement near the end, with the low C's. You've got me really thinking about it, using tam-tam or even bass drum pppp in this place. (I wish I had a double bassoon here
) I agree that it's a very special place: I think everybody can visualize something epic here. What I did here to try and create a special atmosphere was having the double basses, and trombone play a low d, and also 2nd flute play a low d. You would ofcourse have to hear it live, but it did feel really special. Flutes in a low register always add an eerie sound. Cooke actually used flutes to double the viola/cello melody in
bar 56/57, wich again shows that there's a lot of fun to be had orchestrating.
The 'A tempo' after Gehalten is a place where I wouldn't use the tam-tam. I think the character needs to be light there.
Bass drum in
bar 95 is also a good idea, altough I would do a one bar tremolo with diminuendo there. I have timpani playing a d tremolo there in my version, but a bass drum certainly would also have sounded nice.
On another note: I've been in contact with Frans Bouwman, who's preparing a transcription of the sketches of Mahler's 10th symphony. He was ofcourse very interested, and ofcóurse give his transcription to me after I was finished orchestrating by myself
(talk about being late
) He will probably publish his transcriptions somewhere next year, so all you Mahler lovers with no fascimile's near you, keep a good look-out for it! That's also a good thing about living in the Netherlands: I just went to the National Library, got the Zsolnay fascimile of Mahler's sketches, made some copies (library's are really crazy, letting people make copies
) and was home a few hours later, starting on the orchestration.
