Boston Symphony Orchestra/M6 Nelsons

[sbugala]

Here's an odd story: I play lotto tickets from time to time. Missouri's Lottery has a rewards/points system where you can scan recent tickets. Once you get enough points, you can get gift cards, downloads, etc. I happened to stumble upon this, and I almost wondered if it was a pirate recording...except it looked real. I did a search and found Barry advocating for others to hear the streaming audio version of this performance. https://mrb.thefirstclub.lotterymediastore.com/us/music/details/4368865-

This press release https://www.bso.org/brands/bso/media/classical-live.aspx says it's on Google Play and  www.classical-live.com, but the links appear to be dead. So it looks like this was an uncommon way to get a Mahler recording!

Anyone else find this recording through other means?

[John Kim]

I heard this live performance.

I find Nelsons Mahler - Ive heard his M3rd, M5th, M6th, and M9th so far - in general lacking depth and is rather too showy.

He has great lines, notes, and everything in place but I just feel it a bit too superficial.

John

[barryguerrero]

I only heard an online recording of his M8 from Tanglewood. I have to admit, it was disappointing. I did, however, just pick up his Bruckner 7 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. I think he's better suited for Bruckner than Mahler - at least at this time. And you know what?   .      .      .   that's OK! We need more conductors to take an interest in Bruckner as well (it's not an either/or situation with me). 

[Matthew]

There is an interview with Nelsons on the Gramophone website, mainly about Bruckner and Shostakovich, but Mahler gets mentioned:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/interview-andris-nelsons-on-bruckner-and-shostakovich

About Bruckner and Shostakovich, he says: "Neither of these composers, it seems to me when we perform them, is an egotistical composer. You don't feel at any point that the composer is complaining about himself or his life, or that ‘It’s all about me’. There’s no ego-centricity. Take Mahler, another genius, and it’s all about himself!"

I don't get this thing about Mahler being "all about himself". Of course the music is, to an extent, autobiographical, but can we actually "hear" that? For me, the music transcends that, it becomes universal. I think Nikolaus Harnoncourt once said something similar about Berlioz and Mahler being music of the "ego", which is why he didn't perform them. I just don't buy it...

[barryguerrero]

Matthew, I don't buy it either. I don't hear his music that way at all. Yes, Mahler was a man with a number of insecurities, which was understandable given his bizarre home life. But to me, that was NOT what Mahler was projecting in his music. I believe that Mahler would want to be remembered for his music and not for biography.

[John Kim]

Ditto here. I do not think Mahler's music was all about himself. It was rather about the MANKIND and it's conditions. It was about Nature, God, and Heaven. Maybe this is why Nelsons Mahler sounds the way I described it does.

John

[sbugala]

I think this Deryck Cooke note states it well from the liner notes of Giulini's CSO Mahler Ninth:

"Are we then thrown back to the autobiographical approach after all? Not in the least, since the 'subjective' feelings a great composer expresses, it goes without saying, are conceived him as being those of Everyman. If we are often told, Mahler is too much concerned with himself in his music, why does it strike so many sympathetic chords in so many other people's hearts?"

[barryguerrero]

Here - here. Dilly dilly!   

[Matthew]

Ditto here! I think Cooke expresses it perfectly - conductors, take note!

[Prospero]

Virtually all poetry since Wordsworth is about the poet. In the era of media, externality, and technological bombardment the inner world of the artist is one of the few places where authenticity and the quest for meaning and reality can be found.

We live in a world where all externality and all art are in many ways reduced to Trump and his tweets. Sorry if I offend anyone.

Cooke seems to have a good sense of this.

The self in its fullness is how the world can be experienced and communicated. The most revealing and moving artists are those who feel the deepest and see the farthest into themselves and become representatives of the world of human achievement. Wordsworth, Keats, Beethoven, Monet, Rilke, Proust, Whitman, Dickinson, Kandinsky Woolf, and many others.

And I would put Mahler among those poets of self and cosmos.