New Renditions of Mahler: 2nd and 3rd Movement from Symphony No.1

These past few days (evenings) I have been busy revising my recordings of Mahler's Symphony No.1. I want to finalise that recording and create a separate album for it, as a special edition for the Mahler Year. I have started with the 3rd movement, "Hunter's Funeral". There had been some technical problems with my PC MAESTRO-2: this particular file of the 3rd movement caused some stutter, due to some memory problems. I had to copy track by track into a new Sonar file in order to get rid of the problem. Then I still encountered problems: Sonar would suddenly crash at particular locations in the file - when a lot of instruments were simultaneously playing. I did then upgrade to the latest version of Asio4All, and after a while of tinkering I finally got everything working again properly.

The new version of the 3rd movement has only slight changes: some instrument attacks have been adjusted, to properly differentiate between marcato/staccato/legato, a few tempo changes to correct tiny imbalances within measures, and some new expression curves for selected instruments in a few locations.

The same overhaul was done with the 2nd movement. This movement has the inherent problem that I had recorded in in free-style and only later added the tempo quantisation. This has still the effect that not all instrument tracks appear properly synchronised: some quantisation that I did in some tracks in order to properly adhere to tempo and metric had the effect of slightly disrupting the consistent structure, and I will still have to fix that. I corrected a few errors and added some instruments which I had missed in the earlier rendition.

When I compared now the final audio recordings of the new with the previous versions, I hardly can note the difference - it is very subtle.

Here are the new versions, together with all the previous renditions of these movements:

2nd movement

3rd movement

Maybe you can hear the differences to the previous versions?

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No.1, 3rd Movement

The 3rd movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony #1 was inspired by this wood cut by Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871), subtitled "Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis" (The Hunter's Funeral Procession). There is a whole essay written related to this movement, by Francesca Draughon and Raymond Knapp "Gustav Mahler and the Crisis of Jewish Identity", with interesting insight. Not much for me to add here.

I have decided to give my music repository some consistency: the latest version of this music recording of the 3rd movement will be available on the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra web site under the file name MahlerS1M3.wma. Other recording versions will eventually be collected and made accessible in the rehearsal hall which still is to be created.

The version of the recording that is up to today the most recent one is MahlerS1M3_100324_90vbr.wma.

The same principle I will also apply to the surround recordings: The latest version will always be available under MahlerS1M3_5_1.wma, with the most current one up to date available as MahlerS1M3_100326_5_1.wma.

Next steps to do on my list:
- create the Rehearsal Hall in which all versions of any piece that I am working on will be released,
- create the Dress Rehearsal Hall where recordings will be shown that are "ready for prime time" but are part of larger works (for example single movements of symphonies, with the remaining movements still missing),
- create the Concert Hall where the latest and recordings will be available, which are deemed to be of a release quality,
- change the tempo flow of the Hunter's Funeral. When changing the tempo map, I sometimes felt that a bit of rubato would work well. However, when then listening to the overall work, I often realise that this rubato destroys the consistence and coherence of the musical flow. I have to work on this one still...
- add a consistent and coherent reverb environment for the 5.1 recording.

Lots to do, very little time...

A page devoted just to this music piece has now been set up at www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk/Mahler_S1M3.php. It will contain all recordings that I made, plus it will in the future be expanded to contain more information.