Search - Gustav Mahler, Maurice de Abravanel, Utah Symphony Orchestra :: Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6 [DualDisc]

Mahler In Utah

Erik North | San Gabriel, CA USA | 12/13/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Gustav Mahler was always misunderstood during his lifetime for his often extremely emotional and charged symphonic writing. He vowed "My time will come." It did, of course, but it took close to fifty years after his death, first aided by conductors like Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer who knew Mahler personally, and then his popularity exploded outward in the turbulent 1960s, thanks in large measure to Leonard Bernstein, no stranger to hyper-emotionalism he.



But Bernstein wasn't the only one channeling Mahler to modern audiences in America. Way out west, Maurice Abravenel was doing the same, with his vastly underrated Utah Symphony Orchestra, and achieving similar results, though those results were obviously achieved in a different way from Lenny. Of particular note is this recording of Mahler's truly grim Symphony No. 6, known as the "Tragic" Symphony, and for good reason. Aside from its being in A Minor, it is, like all of its other symphonic bretheren in the Mahler canon, a very emotional and staggering piece; and it takes a very skilled hand, which Abravenel clearly showed in this remastered 1974 recording. At just slightly under 71 minutes, whereas other recordings of the symphony cause it to spill across the normal 80-minute limit for a single CD, it seems to go like lightning, while at the same time displaying as much Mahlerian thunder as possible.



Abravenel's tenure at the helm of the Utah Symphony from 1948 to 1979 clearly benefitted the orchestra, which still remains in the shadow of far better-known orchestras in the eyes of most music critics, but their Mahler recordings, and this take on the Mahler 6th, showed that they were an orchestral force to be reckoned with in the Intermountain West."