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Disc 1:
Disc 2:
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Stunning Mahler 6.,
By
This review is from: Great Conductors of the 20th Century - Dmitri Mitropoulos (Audio CD)
This set consists of two discs; the first with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's 6th. Symphony; the second the New York Philharmonic in Berlioz,Debussy and Richard Strauss. All recordings are in mono and date from the 1950's.The New York performances are very well played. The Berlioz Romeo and Juliet music is given an account both beautiful and stirring. The Debussy La Mer is also given a fine if idiosyncratic performance, and this disc ends with Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils. I think the Berlioz shows Mitropoulos at his best here. However the sound in all these New York recordings is shrill and I found it difficult to return to them. The Mahler is another matter altogether. By no means is the Cologne orchestra in the same league technically as the NYPO. But they are utterly committed, cleary inspired and driven by their conductor. I have heard very little Mitropoulos, who seems to be one of those great conductors mysteriously left aside by the marketing machine. Certainly I was shocked in the first movement of the Mahler to hear sudden, unmarked, changes in tempo. At one point I nearly stopped listening. And yet.... Mitropoulos is clearly feeling the music like all great Mahler interpreters, e.g. Bernstein, and the second and third movements carry you forward to that astonishing, concluding movement. The strange opening-which doesn't seem to know what key it's in, the ensuing battle with three enormous hammer blows of fate, are delivered with staggering intensity. The occasional orchestral slip is overlooked as you are carried on by the sheer momentum to the devastating end... Yes this may sound melodramatic, but I believe this is one of the great Mahler Sixth's. It wouldn't be a first choice (my own favourite is Barbirolli on EMI), but at this price it should be snapped up. There is a fascinating sleeve note on the conductor which makes you want to learn, and hear, more...
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Introduction To Mitropoulos,
By
This review is from: Great Conductors of the 20th Century - Dmitri Mitropoulos (Audio CD)
This is great value for money. Vivid, pungently characterised music from New York on Disc 2. The Strauss and Berlioz are particularly fine; the Debussy, as the booklet says, "more fire than water", is the least convincing perhaps, unless Mitropoulos' Sea is treated as a psychological portrait of mental turbulence.
The Mahler 6th is worth the money alone. Swift enough to fit on one disc, lively without the audience noise and a performance where the psyche of the conductor seems perfectly attuned to that of the composer. Nervous, intense and truly harrowing in the finale, yet it was aspects of the middle movements that struck me, especially when compared with my other recording, the Karajan one. A vital entry in an interesting series. 14/09/10: Since writing the above, I have seen a revelatory excerpt of the peroration to La Mer conducted by Abbado in Berlin. It restores the most majestic brass fanfares, given there to trumpets (not horns). Mitropoulos' recording also has the trumpets, so I must revise my remarks above accordingly. They really add something.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.8 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews) 8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
memorable performances,
By R. J. Claster "rjclaster" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Great Conductors of the 20th Century - Dmitri Mitropoulos (Audio CD)
Mahler lovers should definitely listen to this highly distinctive performance of the 6th symphony, taken from a 1959 radio broadcast. Like Bernstein's Sony account, it is extremely intense, not as frantic and frenzied, but with more flexible adjustments of pace within a basic tempo and a richer, more expressive use of rubato in its shaping of phrases, in distinction to the more emotionally restrained, classically tight recordings of Karajan, Szell and Thomas Sanderling. The orchestra is that of the Cologne Radio, not quite as flawless in its playing as those in the aforementioned recordings, but giving their all, and the sound is in clear, full-bodied and spacious mono.The other performances on this set are also quite distinctive (they are excerpts from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, La Mer and Dance of the Seven Veils, all from 1950s mono recordings with the NY Phil). 7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dramatic Music-Making by Dimitri,
By D. J. Zabriskie "zabdart" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Great Conductors of the 20th Century - Dmitri Mitropoulos (Audio CD)
The great thing that Mitropoulos brought to the table as a conductor was his innate sense of the drama of music. As noted by other reviewers, Mitropoulos' approached every score afresh without reference to how anybody else did it, achieving remarkable results which were never stale. Nowhere is this more evident than in the remarkable recording of the Mahler Sixth included here. This performance is also available on a more expensive imported collection, but to have it available in this price range makes this a recording no Mahler fan should be without! I reviewed this performance in that collection, but to recap: The clarity of line and detail in this performance, even though it is in mono, is unsurpassed by any recording of this music I have heard. That's not always a virtue, as the first horn of the Cologne Radio Symphony is noticeably off-key in the opening, but Mitropoulos gets right by that and roars through a first movement that's truly astounding. His tempi are flexible, heightening the musical drama. Instead of the prophecy of Nazi jackboots we hear all too frequently in the opening march, Mitropoulos gives of the groans of 19th Century Europe being dragged kicking and screaming into the full horrors of the industrial age. It's a brilliant conceptualization, and probably a lot closer to what Mahler intended. There is more humor to the scherzo here, as well, that what we're used to hearing, but it is all dark, cynical gallows humor. Mitropoulos uses the offstage horns in the adagio not to evoke the calls of pastoral herdsmen, but rather the haunting of the spirits of a way of life already lost forever. Mitropoulos correctly conveys this music's sense of Europe at the crossroads, but it is the crossroads of an older man returning to his home after a long absence, only to find no one he recognizes and nothing to take solace in. In the Sixth, Mahler mourns a world which accomplishes so much materially and technologically at the expense of spiritualty, and that is exactly what Mitropoulos finds in the score and converys better than any other conducter I have heard.
Likewise, the Berlioz and Debussy performances contained here are full of dramatic tension, which Mitropoulos holds onto as long as he can, waiting until the very end to release it. Unfortunately, this dramatic approach to music-making is not so successful with the Strauss selection, taking it to extremes of melodrama which verge on camp. Nevertheless, get this for the Mahler Sixth! It may not be definitive, but it is nothing short of AMAZING! 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great musical imaginaiton poorly served by ragged playing,
By Santa Fe Listener - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Great Conductors of the 20th Century - Dmitri Mitropoulos (Audio CD)
Mitropoulos was unlucky to die (on the podium, like Giuseppe Sinopoli after him) at the premature age of 64. His commercial recordings have more or less disappeared, leaving it to pirate recordings and live performances to sustain his renown. Many, many have come out, and although one admires his instinctive gifts and his improvisatory approach--which greatly influenced his protoge Leonard Bernstein--Mitropoulos lays claim to being the sloppiest of all great conductors, excepting only Hermann Scherchen and Jascha Horenstein.
His gifts and defects shine brightly on CD 1, which is devoted to a very alive, sympathetic Mahler Sixth from 1959. It perfectly shows off DM's imaginative sense of Mahler style; everything is so fresh and direct one could swear the music is being invented before our eyes. But the Cologne radio orchestra is far from being able to execute Mahler with technical security (good broadcast stereo for its day, however). If technical defects don't bother you, this performance deserves six stars. CD 2 comes from studio recordings with Mitropoulos's own NY Phil. and is afflicted with many fewer mishaps. Execution is still fairly slapdash, though. Lovers of imaginative conducting won't care. In excerpts from Berlioz'a Romeo and Juliet(1952) we hear Berlioz on an expressive level to rival and surpass Munch and Monteux. Everything is light, flexible, and seductively musical. La Mer from 1950 is in more detailed sound, although all these mono recordings sound a bit tinny. Mitropoulos's Debussy is eerie, mysterious, and powerful. Mitropoulos was a fierce Strauss conductor, and his 1956 Dance of the Seven Veils is probably the most nerve-wracking you'll ever hear. Overall, despite the caveats about sound and sloppy orchestral work, few conductors in this series have emerged sounding so inspired. Five stars, without a doubt. |
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