A few months ago we ran Mahler’s 5th as a Friday OT piece and I mentioned in passing in the post that my knowledge of Mahler wasn’t particularly deep. Cut to three weeks ago; a mail arrived from reader KW who’d just caught that Mahler Five on these humble pages, professed her love of Mahler and along the way (with a few other links and suggestions) asked me whether I’d ever seen this…
…the Mahler 2 done at the 2011 Proms by Gustavo Dudamel and the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra.
I hadn’t, but now I have several times. Sublime music, a climatic ending, the crowd go wild at the end as they darned well should after something this bogglingly good. And check out the players, who knew how well they’d nailed it, choking back the tears as they lap up the applause and cheers. It’s rapidly becoming my favourite piece of music and if this doesn’t get you to fall for Mahler nothing will.
UPDATE Saturday afternoon. Reader ‘IS’ has just mailed in and made my day:
“Just wanted to say that I’ve been reading your blog for some years now. I don’t really give a crap about mining. I mostly read it for the little tidbits of Latin American News as that’s what I teach but I gotta say… you put some pretty sweet music up man! That Mahler piece was fantastic!”