Little in Gustav Mahler's output is truly obscure, since practically everything he composed has been performed and recorded innumerable times, and even his unfinished works are often heard in viable performing versions. For this 2013 release on MDG, Stefan Blunier and the Beethoven Orchester Bonn have recorded three curiously mismatched works that had at one time been neglected, rejected as inferior, or treated as a special case. The youthful cantata, Das klagende Lied, was subjected to drastic revisions over two decades, ...
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Little in Gustav Mahler's output is truly obscure, since practically everything he composed has been performed and recorded innumerable times, and even his unfinished works are often heard in viable performing versions. For this 2013 release on MDG, Stefan Blunier and the Beethoven Orchester Bonn have recorded three curiously mismatched works that had at one time been neglected, rejected as inferior, or treated as a special case. The youthful cantata, Das klagende Lied, was subjected to drastic revisions over two decades, with Mahler ultimately cutting the first movement and performing the truncated work as late as 1901. Once thought lost, the original three-movement version was only discovered in 1969, and it finally saw publication in 1997. Blumine, a short section of Mahler's Symphonic Poem in Two Parts, later dubbed "Titan," was scrapped when Mahler published the revised work as his Symphony No. 1 in D major. It has sometimes resurfaced in recordings of the symphony since the 1980s, though its...
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