Gilbert Kaplan's musical career has been almost entirely devoted to performing Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection," and an arrangement of the work for small orchestra is used for his third major release, following recordings of Mahler's original with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. For this 2014 CD on Avie, Kaplan leads the Wiener KammerOrchester with soprano Marlis Petersen, mezzo-soprano Janina Baechle, and the Wiener Singakademie, and even though the orchestra is about ...
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Gilbert Kaplan's musical career has been almost entirely devoted to performing Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection," and an arrangement of the work for small orchestra is used for his third major release, following recordings of Mahler's original with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. For this 2014 CD on Avie, Kaplan leads the Wiener KammerOrchester with soprano Marlis Petersen, mezzo-soprano Janina Baechle, and the Wiener Singakademie, and even though the orchestra is about half the size of Mahler's intended forces, it doesn't sound especially thin or depleted, quite unlike the true chamber versions of Mahler's music arranged by Arnold Schoenberg, Erwin Stein, and others. The chief benefit of this reduction, arranged by Kaplan and Rob Mathes, is that it makes the Second Symphony available to community orchestras and other ensembles that can't muster the numbers to pull off the full instrumentation. Yet many listeners won't be able to detect much of a...
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