Choose Your Own Damn Mahler Adventure
Do you love Mahler? Do you want to marry him and have his babies? Well it’s a bit late for that, but it’s not too late to participate in Deutsche Grammophon and Decca’s latest foray into the classical music social media scene. They’ve done a bang-up job arranging this one.
The idea is that they are putting together a new Mahler boxset. “But Ben! Those are a dime a dozen — well maybe a grand a dozen, but you can definitely buy 12″ I can hear you verbosely shouting at me through the internet. Well yes, but the difference here is that every symphony in the set is from a different conductor and orchestra, and it’s the voting public who get to decide which ones go in the set. “But Ben! I don’t own every single boxset, how will I compare renditions without shelling out thousands of dollars?” comes your next, sensibly thrifty proclamation.
Well that’s the best bit: you can stream — for free! — what appears to be their entire Mahler catalog, in order to confirm your decision.
Moved
Ok! I’ve got internet dripping off of my eyelids again. I’ve got music streaming wirelessly from the ‘office’ aka ‘north wing’ aka ‘disaster recovery zone’ into the living room, courtesy of the software titan we love to hate: Microsoft. Yeah, I’ve been a hardcore free-software lovin’ flower child for the last ten years, but now that there is an XBox sitting underneath the TV it requires about three clicks and a few wireless password entries to get everything pumped out there. It makes me feel dirty, but it works so nicely.
Unfortunately it makes you feel that MP3/Classical culture clash like BAM.
Still, we had piping hot, fresh Saint-Saens plummeting into the room during our introductory househeating meal of eggplant parmesan and freshly picked cherry pie. Good old Saint-Saens. He’s the bloke that got me into the genre. We were actually listening to the very piece that did the dirty, the 2nd piano concerto:
But the one I really like is the 4th. Anyone got any hot youtubings of that one? It’s so sparse, I love it. It’s like Shostakovich CC2 (another fave), in that there are rarely lots of groups of instruments playing at once. I remember intially thinking “what a waste of an orchestra!”, like if you’re paying ‘em all to sit there playing you wanna get the most bang for your buck. Everyone, full blast, all the time. Now I relish these unpopulated pieces. They’re pensive, cautious. The phrasing is more like equations in a quantum mechanics textbook than the bloody emissions of a sore heart.