Mahler: Symphony No 5 > Reviews > From Vienna to Venice

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Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
Value for Money

Advantages:	Great music is always an advantage .  .  .
Disadvantages:	Great music don't have it

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Gustav Mahler has written 10 Symphonies that represent a huge musical, human and cultural adventure.

Great conductor, only lately has been what is: a big composer.

Cultured man, always busy, even though with one he greets unsteady, he has succeeded in giving us ten "pearls" that nothing fear to the comparison with the nine of Beethoven (for decades believes that any composer worthy of note could overcome, in the number, the prophetic Nine of the Symphonies of the musician of Bonn, a sort of curse).

To honor of the truth this sort of "Columns of Ercole" they were old, still living Ludwig from himself - even if certain tests of a Tenth of Beethoven don't have -, from him greatest fan: Schubert; this however is known only in our century with the recoveries of patient musicologists).

The symphonies of Mahler were denigrated and derided thick author.

Today, that can listen their with the clear of mind from prejudices, we have to recognize their greatness "absolute" without forgetting they open the road to so much back music.

You are enough to think about Schoenberg, the inventor of the so-called dodecafonia (new method to compose music proposed around 1915), that appreciated him and as great teacher showed him; to Berg that more times he quotes, in his writings, Mahler declaring how much it musically owed him, etc.

The Symphony that I have a preference for, but saying this I feel a hold to the stomach for the "blame" that I do to the others, it is the Seventh one and particularly the two enchanting, "strange" Nachtmusiken that they constitute the traditional slow Time and the other one of it, the "Scherzo".

Here, all plays indeed, as if it came from another world and the "recognition" that of the night makes the great Gustav opens the road to a series of questions on the art and on the world.

We can hear timbres mix (texture) unusual to that epoch (we are in 1905) as, for instance, the beautiful trio of the "Scherzo" with mandolin and guitar that so much part they will have in the music of the composers of the so-called "Second school in Vienna" (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern).

And whether to say some funeral march themes that play again entirely in a context "extraneous", almost "exorcism" of the death?
We don't forget that Mahler was a lot of friend of Freud: the two often met theirselves and they exchanged ideas that then, somehow, we find again in the work of the one and the other.

But, as I said before, every Symphony contains in itself of the such beauties that I hope that the readers of Ciao.com want to tell.

I am not able to recommend a discografy that it is reasonable: first because not many managers are risked in these "colossuses" (the duration of Seventh one of which I speak above is one hour and twenty minutes!) and then because the executions that I have listened, for a verse or for the other they seem me all excellent ones.
Probably who is about to face the arduous assignment knows it and he does only when he feels to have the correct maturity (to keep silent about orchestra...).

If really I was forced to reveal some names...
I would say Abbado with the Berliner, then Boulez always with the same orchestra but there is a team of Russian Conductors as Rodjensvenskji that seems indeed very inspired and this has an explanation.

The "Soviet" composer for excellence, the only one that has reached the world fame, despite his complete devotion to the debatable one "cultural politics" of the then U.R.S.S., it is Shostakovic which, for his same admission, owes a lot to Mahler.

The Fourth Symphony of the Russian would not be thinkable before without the Fourth or the Bohemian's Fifth, with that sense "panic" and at the same time "magic" of the nature that permeates and it unites so the three Symphonies.

In the title I told from Vienna to Venice (implicitly remembering "You death in Venice " in the cinema version, in which the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony of Mahler is used), but I could also have been telling for the century of the romanticism that of the more disenchanted and, together, deperate vision of the life that has been the whole century that we have been having for little time greeted .

But enough, to the others the space otherwise I end up writing of everybody and ten the Symphonies. Once broken the silence it is difficult to embank the whirlwind of thoughts, emotions and reflections that this music succeeds in arousing.