COMPOSERS: Mahler
LABELS: RCA Victor Red Seal
WORKS: Symphony No. 10 in F sharp (ed. Remo Mazzetti Jr)
PERFORMER: St Louis SO/Leonard Slatkin
CATALOGUE NO: 09026 68190 2 DDD
Mazzetti’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony is the fourth to appear in the last fifty years and was premiered in 1989. First impressions are of a sound-world closer to the one we know from Mahler’s earlier symphonies, where Deryck Cooke, in his Sixties performing edition, emphasised the forward-looking, almost proto-Bergian expressionism in Mahler’s sketches.
This world premiere recording certainly makes fascinating listening if you know the Cooke, and may indeed convert more of those who believe the work shouldn’t be performed at all. Slatkin’s reading was recorded at concerts in St Louis in 1994 (though it is not billed as ‘live’ – that information comes from a fascinating twenty-minute illustrated talk comparing the four editors’ solutions to different passages, on a free companion disc).
Plenty of the detail emerges in the recording; if there is anything missing, it is a certain profundity and passion early on in the work, though Slatkin memorably scales the heights in the finale. Thus, for all its interest this issue does not replace the Rattle/Cooke (EMI) as an overall recommendation for the work, though it is a disc no Mahlerian would want to miss. Matthew Rye