Mahler: Symphony No.1, 2nd Movement

The recording of the second movement of this symphony is now complete. I did not have much opportunity to work on it during the past weeks, but once I started the remaining work, it went quite fast. The recordings - the very latest one plus the earlier partial recordings - are at www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk/Mahler_S1M2.php.

The next tasks are to create recordings of the first and the forth movement - these are gigantic works, and I am quite sure that I will not be able to complete these recordings before 7.July, Mahler's 150th birthday... pity.

I also ordered the score of the lost movement "Blumine", which had originally been a part of this Symphony. That should be a relatively quick task to do, since it is a slow movement; but I never heard it nor have I seen the score... so this has some uncertainty.

On my site about Mahler and his First Symphony I mentioned the programmatic content that was originally handed out as program note for the performance. There were very nice titles, and I am going to adapt them. This second movement will hereby be known as "Set with full sails", indicating an optimistic start into the future. The whole symphony will be entitled as "From the life of a lonely one". That is so much more fitting than "Symphony No.1, D major". I think the classic music community has gotten used over the years to those non-descript titles of orchestra works, which really do not do any justice to the wonderful music they are supposed to describe. Also, I will break with the tradition of using the tempo instructions as titles for symphony movements: why should a work be entitled "Largo" or "Presto"? This is only intended for the conductor and for the orchestra players, so that they know how fast to play. These are completely inappropriate titles... and I intend to use different ones. Fortunately, Mahlers "Song of the Earth" does have very descriptive titles - it appears that at the end of his life he returned to using programmatic titles, which convey at least a glimpse of the context in which the music was envisioned.