Thanks for sharing.
This isn’t Mahler… this is Mahler filtered through the mind of another composer who doesn’t quite "get" the source material. Carpenter gives his own ego far too much airtime here. It sometimes sounds like an "orchestration-off" (as in "dance-off") in which Carpenter is trying to out-Mahler Mahler and shoehorn this music into a late-Scriabin soundworld with nothing more sophisticated than (pardon the language; it is crude but hopefully effective) a metric fuck-tonne of notes that come raining down all over Mahler and wash away his essence in a sea of show-off arrangements.
"What to do" with Mahler’s 10th is, of course, a question that has many different answers – ranging from "leave it completely alone", to Deryck Cooke’s "Just the facts, ma’am!" performing version, all the way through to hyper-interventionist "completions" like this. As far as I’m concerned, the only person who could "complete" the work is Mahler and he died before he could do it. It cannot be completed, not ever – any attempt to do so is going to end up as some other composer doing Mahler pastiche. All that can be done is to take the music that Mahler did complete and do the barest minimum necessary to make it performable. Therefore, my "comfort" with Mahler’s 10th begins and ends with Cooke. Anything further can be very interesting (as Carpenter’s version is) but is, to my mind, emphatically not Mahler’s 10th or indeed Mahler’s anything.
Putting words in the mouth of a dead man, I think, is distasteful… particularly when we’re talking about words that belong to a story as complex and deeply personal as Mahler’s 10th Symphony – a story of infidelity, sadness, fear of death, sickness, and depression.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg548/dsphipps100/thumb.gif
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