Following up on Karl Miller's review of the new recording of Bruno Walter's Symphony, here's my review at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001I3GCSM/classicalnet: Most of us of a certain age remember Bruno Walter as the genial conductor of some of the most important Columbia discs of the 1950s. He, of course, had been a protege of Mahler and as a young man had given premieres of some of his works (e.g. Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony). Early on he had intended to be a composer/conductor like his mentor. And he wrote two symphonies, this recording of the First being only the second performance of it since its premiere in 1907. But he gave up on composing shortly thereafter. He had shown this symphony to Mahler who had a tepid reaction to it and later wrote 'Unfortunately, it means nothing to me, and my frank opinion put him [Walter] in a state of mild despair.' I think Mahler was on to something. Although this work -- nearly an hour long -- has some moments, it strikes me as awkwardly written, with tortured counterpoint, undistinguished thematic material, and in the first two movements at least an atmosphere of unrelieved murky gloom. It does, of course, partake of those expressionistic elements characteristic of the emerging Second Viennese School and probably is closest in effect to that of the music of Berg. Still, one can think of marvelous works by such composers as Berg, Zemlinsky, and early Schoenberg that leave it in the dust. The first movement, nearly twenty minutes long, is a crushingly angst-ridden muddle. The second movement, an adagio, is almost as long and its manner is even more crepuscular. The scherzo is a sardonic waltz whose manner comes closest to that of Mahler and it is actually my favorite of the four movements. The finale puts us back again in the tortured nighttime but it does conclude with a bang-up finish. I suppose one could compare this symphony with Mahler's Seventh, the popularly-called 'Song of the Night', but it comes nowhere near having that admittedly difficult symphony's power. The performance by the adventurous conductor, Leon Botstein, and the NDR Symphony does at times sound a bit tentative and indeed, since this symphony has no performance history over the last ninety years, this is not a big surprise. Still, this is the only game in town and if you are interested to hear music written by this giant conductor, this CD would have to be it. I applaud the cpo label for bringing us music by otherwise unheard conductor/composers -- one immediately thinks of the music of Felix Weingartner they've have brought out -- but I'm not terribly high on this particular one. Scott Morrison *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html