Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians. Over the years, Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow, released more and more of Mahler’s sketches, and gradually it became clear that he had written an entire five-movement symphony in short score. Of this, nearly half had reached the stage of a draft orchestration, while the rest contained indications of the intended instrumentation. Over the years, a number of different completions have seen the light of day. One of the most often performed and recorded of these is that by Deryck Cooke, who insisted that his edition was not a completion of the work but rather a functional presentation of the materials as Mahler left them. Cooke’s version is the one that Osmo Vänskä has chosen for the seventh installment in his Mahler series with the Minnesota Orchestra.
Mahler: Symphony No. 10 – Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
