Okay, so, the Mahler 6th.
With George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra – the very mention of which acts as a sort of trigger, making me … post things.
When I was a wee one and had just been trundled off to the Cleveland Institute of Music in the fall of 1967 (wait -- don't get excited, I took great care not to make anything of myself), I'd just been introduced that summer to Bernstein's recording of the Second, my first Mahler ever. Like all impressionable youth at that moment in history, I was swept away in the Lenny-inspired Mahler explosion. When we saw that Szell was conducting the Sixth, a group of us walked from the CWRU dorms down to Severance Hall on a beautiful October evening, having no idea what lay in store at our first Cleveland Orchestra concert.
It was, to be precise, one of my three or four musical epiphanies to date. There was nothing like the Sixth. Not in Mahler, not anywhere else. I was blinded by it – the intensity, the darkness, the tinkling cowbells over magical chord progressions played on the celesta, the hammer strokes, yadda yadda, sorry, I’ll stop. But I liken that concert to my first viewing of "West Side Story" a few years prior -- a musical life altering event, no more and no less. To this day, I live and breathe these two pieces like no other.
I returned to the Sunday afternoon concert to find it was not a dream, that I was really hearing and seeing this magnificent piece performed in this perfect place. I was likewise glued when the concert was broadcast on the local classical FM station, but sadly, had no (reel-to-reel) recorder with which to capture it.
The celesta (keyboard) part was of particular interest, because I was a piano major who was already finding I loved orchestral and theatrical music far more than piano literature. I had yet to meet him, but I watched it being played in those concerts by then-assistant conductor James Levine, and I resolved at that moment to play keyboard parts in his school orchestra if at all possible. Long story short, it was, and a couple of years later, he scheduled the Mahler 6th, and yrs truly was handed the celesta part.
(It is of course folly to maintain this after all of these years, but I believe that this here private pressing LP of Levine’s live performance still represents the epitome of how this piece should be played, and its impact in a live concert acoustic.)
Szell died, having never recorded the Sixth. But wait! Though I was buying tons of records in those days, the fact that Columbia had subsequently issued that 1967 concert on LP somehow escaped my notice for a few years. But then, what a gift – to be able to re-hear that actual performance. The 1970s of course were no golden age when it came to mainstream vinyl pressings, and I’m sure BK’s import CD blows it properly away.
There. There now. The End. We can all breathe a sigh of relief.
