Mahler’s Tenth Symphony

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony
A collection of reviews by Ralph Moore

The following is a compilation of links to the reviews I have posted on MusicWeb covering twenty-two recordings from the first commercial issue by Sony in 1965 to the most recent in 2019 from BIS.

Most are studio recordings and most use one of the arrangements by Deryck Cooke but I have also included completions by Wheeler, Carpenter, Barshai, Mazzetti, Gamzou and the Samale–Mazzuca–Phillips–Cohrs team. I use the term “completion” loosely, insofar as Mahler left a complete short score, so the subsequent performing versions are inevitably somewhat speculative with regard to orchestration.

Recommendations
As you may read in the reviews, I cannot recommend the Carpenter completion except for the musicologically curious; otherwise, I think all the other six have great merit. The Gamzou is a one-off and again a highly meritorious curiosity; on balance, most people prefer the Cooke but I know many who, like me, favour Barshai’s slightly more interventionist but still highly plausible version, and for many others Rattle’s live composite recording of the so-called SMPC realisation with the BPO is a benchmark. I also retain a love of the first commercial recording by Ormandy which features simply beautiful playing by the Philadelphia Orchestra and whereby so many people, including me, came to know the work.

My preferences are therefore inevitably personal and subjective, but here are they are for what they are worth:
Cooke: Wyn Morris*, Harding, Gielen, Dausgaard
Barshai: Barshai himself*
SMPC: Rattle*
Wheeler: Olson
*first choices

Reviews