courtesy of Naxos of America
Towards the end of this past January, BIS Records released the seventh installment in its project to record the music of Gustav Mahler performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under the baton of Music Director Osmo Vänskä. The performance was recorded at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis in June of 2019, long before the onset of pandemic conditions. Indeed, the preceding sixth installment of Mahler’s seventh symphony was released last year at the beginning of June; so it appears that BIS is doing its best to stay on its originally-planned schedule.
The seventh release is devoted to the tenth symphony, which was not completed during Mahler’s lifetime. When Mahler died on May 18, 1911, he left both drafts and sketches. These are summarized on the Wikipedia page for this symphony as follows: “72 pages of full score, 50 pages of continuous short score draft (two of which are missing), and a further 44 pages of preliminary drafts, sketches, and inserts.”
The overall plan was for five movements. As in his other five-movement symphonies, there is a symmetry to the ordering of the movements; but each five-movement symphony has its own unique design. That of the tenth is framed by two slow movements. The second and fourth movements are both scherzos, with a short allegro at the very center given the title “Purgatorio.”
Efforts to prepare this material date back to the 1920s, when Ernst Krenek compiled the first performing version at the request of Mahler’s widow Alma Mahler-Werfel. That amount to complete accounts of the first and third movements. An account of all five movements had to wait for 1959, when Deryck Cooke began work of the full symphony.
On December 9, 1960, the BBC aired a “progress report” of Cooke’s efforts performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Berthold Goldschmidt. Alma’s initial reaction was to bar any further performances, but she changed her mind after she saw Cooke’s score. Goldschmidt conducted the completed version at a Proms concert on August 13, 1964. Several months later, the score was given its American premiere by Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. I was in my sophomore year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; but I made a special trip to Philadelphia (my home town) for the occasion. I subsequently purchased the vinyl album based on Ormandy’s performance.
Since that time Cooke continued to work on the score, producing two revised versions. The last of these was printed in 1989. This is the version that is most frequently performed and the one that Vänskä used for his Minnesota concerts and recording. What has struck me most about this recording is the conductor’s determination to do justice to the extremely wide range of dynamic levels required by the score. Thus, almost all of the first movement is constrained to a barely audible level to allow the climax to register with the most impact. (It is worth observing that all twelve chromatic pitches are reverberating at the peak of that climax. However, their distribution across the entire ensemble avoids any sense of atonality.)
Even with Alma’s blessing, Cooke’s efforts provoked a fair amount of controversy. Here in San Francisco, Michael Tilson Thomas never conducted anything other than the symphony’s first movement with the San Francisco Symphony. That placed him in a camp with other conductors, including Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, and Bernard Haitink. Personally, I do not feel that Cooke did anything that would tarnish Mahler’s reputation; and I was pleased to see that Vänskä treated his performance of “Cooke III” as just another step in his journey through the full canon of Mahler symphonies. Presumably, his audiences in Minneapolis felt the same way!
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