“The Tenth Symphony remained dormant until, in 1941 [thirty years after Mahler’s death], a Canadian airman in London, Jack Diether, decided there was one man who could finish Mahler’s Tenth. He wrote, during the Siege of Leningrad, to Dmitri Shostakovich, who declined, saying, ‘This calls for deep penetration into the spiritual world of the composer.’ Diether shared his setback with [civil servant] Joe Wheeler, who played in a Saturday-afternoon orchestra on a widow’s farm in Essex. Wheeler started tinkering with the sketches that Alma Mahler had published in facsimile and tried them out with his amateur ensemble. … [He] test-drove four versions with his farmyard band, one of whose members was Deryck Cooke, a BBC employee who wrote classical schedules for the listings magazine Radio Times. Hearing that the classical Third Programme was planning a cycle of Mahler symphonies for the 1960 centenary of the composer’s birth, Cooke proposed a radio documentary about the unheard Tenth. To conduct the orchestra he booked Berthold Goldschmidt, a German emigre with strong Mahlerian antecedents. On December, 1960 the Cooke-Goldschmidt version of the Tenth went out on the air into British homes and was commented upon abroad.” ~Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? (Faber & Faber, 2010)
Above Gustav Mahler, his wife Alma’s young lover, architect-in-the-making Walter Gropius, and Alma herself at 30: Daniel Barenboim conducts what Leonard Bernstein deems Mahler’s greatest symphony, the song cycle “Das lied von der erde”. Waltraud Meier and Sigfried Jerusalem, vocalists.
Plus:
- Symphony No 1 in D Major (Klaus Tennstedt, Chicago 1990)
- Kindertotenlieder, song cycle (Hampson, Bernstein, Vienna)
- Adagietto from Symphony No 5 in C-sharp Minor (Karajan, Berlin)
- Symphony No 10 in F-sharp Major (Cooke version, Simon Rattle, Bournmouth)
- “The Story So Far, with Conductor John Wilson”
- “The Story So Far; Or, Conductor John Wilson—His Limits”
- “Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah, and Filipinos Will Save Classical Music (PDF)”
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 