Who Was?

[ateolf]

Had a deployment at work and then maybe what I did isn't working quite right and so have to look into it on Monday...woo. Anyway, after that, in the evening, Mary Beth and I went downtown to the Halloran to see MSO doing an "unplugged" show on Who Was Gustav Mahler? It mostly focused on his First Symphony. Like the other time we went to an "unplugged" thing, there was a half-lecture component and they'd play parts of the work and break it down. This time though, they didn't play the whole symphony all together. They played all of the movements just not all together (and not a hundred percent sure if they played all of the third movement or not, this one they broke up into a couple pieces anyway). They also interspersed this with some of his songs from Songs of a Wayfarer (the soprano who sang them was really good!) as much of the music for one of them was clearly repurposed into the third movement. And at one point they also played the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony (the only non-early work they interposed...I don't think for any reason except that it's his most famous and I guess Bob wanted to play it because he also finds it so moving! no problem here!). Anyway, it was all a nice time. It would have been nice to get the whole First Symphony played all together so I could hear everything in context. But also, they're on a smaller stage than usual at the Halloran and so they don't have the full large orchestra that Mahler wrote for so it's not-quite-the-whole-thing in that sense anyway. But I do appreciate what they do with the breaking things down and all.