Critical opinions of Leonard Bernstein's intensely personal readings of Gustav Mahler's symphonies have run the gamut from adulatory to dismissive, and time has not yet brought a consensus on these historic performances with the New York Philharmonic, originally released on Columbia and presented in this 2009 box set from Sony. Few can deny Bernstein's lasting importance in promoting Mahler's cause, for in the 1960s and early '70s there was only a handful of conductors of comparable magnitude who specialized in this music, ...
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Critical opinions of Leonard Bernstein's intensely personal readings of Gustav Mahler's symphonies have run the gamut from adulatory to dismissive, and time has not yet brought a consensus on these historic performances with the New York Philharmonic, originally released on Columbia and presented in this 2009 box set from Sony. Few can deny Bernstein's lasting importance in promoting Mahler's cause, for in the 1960s and early '70s there was only a handful of conductors of comparable magnitude who specialized in this music, and his work in this first-ever complete cycle and in his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings certainly caught the attention of the world. Whatever one may think of Bernstein's dubious choices of dynamics and tempos or his excessive self-identification with the composer (the leading reasons why some listeners avoid these renditions in favor of recordings made by more faithful and self-effacing conductors), he certainly threw himself wholeheartedly into the effort, provoked enough...
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