I’ve just started reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. I’ll have more to say on the book when I’ve finished with it (and that’ll be a while; I’m only about fifty pages in as of this writing), but in reading the passages early on about Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, I realized that I haven’t listened to the music of either composer in a great while – years, for most of their works I have on disc, and in several cases, over a decade. Ouch. That’s too long to spend out of the company of such great composers. So, as I’m writing this post (and playing Mah-Jong on the laptop), I’m listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D (the “Titan”).
I’m struck anew by this symphony’s earthiness. I knew a number of things about Mahler’s life before I ever heard any of his work, and the things I knew mainly concerned his preoccupation with death, the giant scale on which his musical thoughts formed, his gargantuan orchestrations, and the like. When I first listened to the Symphony No. 1, with its dreamy an mysterious introduction, I heard nothing aside from what I expected. But then the work’s first melody proper begins, a gentle tune in the low strings that is by turns jaunty and lyrical, almost like a folksong. In the second movement, the rhythms are straight out of folk dance, and the third movement relies on a minor-key rendition of “Frere Jacques”. Only in the last movement does the symphony seem to reach the sense of scale and plumbing of epic depths that are thought to be typical of Mahler.
I’d forgotten how much I like this symphony.
(My recording of the Mahler Symphony No. 1 has Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony.)