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.
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.
ReplyDeleteOddly 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