I remember the first time I heard the music of Gustav Mahler. I was thirteen years old. It was August of the year 1967. It was a few weeks before I started high school. I turned on the radio. I heard music that grabbed my attention instantly. It was a choral work, the likes of which I had never heard before. I had to find out what the music was, who had written it. It was, of course, the Mahler Eighth Symphony, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand. I know that was the first time I had heard Mahler's music. I don't know if I had even heard of Mahler before that.
I was watching a YouTube video of the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas talking about his first exposure to Mahler's music. He too was thirteen years old the first time he heard Mahler.
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This is the portion of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde that Michael Tilson Thomas talks about: the first Mahler he had ever heard at age 13.
Oddly enough, this was the same recording that first exposed me to this music. I heard this on the radio on a Sunday in, I believe, early March 1969, when I was 15 years old.
Sidney Rothstein was doing several movements from Das Lied at The Music Factory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtV7TSRLs5Y&feature=fvwrel
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