Mildly abashed to see no further enthusiasm - well, undying passion - for the live 1939 Mengelberg. "Growing up with" the Gramophone and Radio 3 through the 70s, it felt like an essential part of your education in the performance tradition....alongside the Szell perhaps, but of course well before it and in a very contrasting interpretative style.
“….of all [Mengelberg’s] Mahler performances, this is by some distance the most important. ….a wonderful demonstration of a great orchestra playing at the peak of its powers in a live concert. It also offers an inexhaustible source of insights, particularly into the matter of the use of rubato in Mahler’s music, into a particular, and in some measure, authenticated tradition of Mahler interpretation…..
…..a performance which must of necessity be in the collection of anyone who loves this symphony in particular or Mahler’s music in general.”
No less than - Richard Osborne, Gramophone 4/86
“….of all [Mengelberg’s] Mahler performances, this is by some distance the most important. ….a wonderful demonstration of a great orchestra playing at the peak of its powers in a live concert. It also offers an inexhaustible source of insights, particularly into the matter of the use of rubato in Mahler’s music, into a particular, and in some measure, authenticated tradition of Mahler interpretation…..
…..a performance which must of necessity be in the collection of anyone who loves this symphony in particular or Mahler’s music in general.”
No less than - Richard Osborne, Gramophone 4/86
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