Minnesota Orchestra/Vanska - Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 10

Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians � a kind of Holy Grail of 20th-century music. Recognized as an intensely personal work, it was initially consigned to respectful oblivion, but over the years, Alma Mahler, the composer�s widow, released more and more of Mahler�s sketches for publication, and gradually it became clear that he had in fact bequeathed an entire five-movement symphony in short score (i.e. written on three or four staves). Of this, nearly half had reached the stage of a draft orchestration, while the rest contained indications of the intended instrumentation. Over the years a number of different completions or performing versions of �the Tenth� have seen the light of day. One of the most often performed and recorded of these is that by Deryck Cooke. Cooke himself insisted that his edition was not a �completion� of the work, but rather a functional presentation of the materials as Mahler left them. Cooke�s performing version of the symphony is the one that Osmo V�nsk� has chosen to use for the seventh instalment in his and the Minnesota Orchestra�s Mahler series, a cycle characterized by an unusual transparency and clarity of sound as well as musical conception.