In my weekly feature: Going to see the lovely and talented Helene Grimaud do the piano concerto no. 4 with London Phil tomorrow night (also some guy named Mahler later in the program). Have seen her do the no. 5 but never the (even) greater 4. Here, as a treat, she does the entire concerto in a high-quality video from a few years back:
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I see that the Mahler" piece that will follow the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto is the Fifth Symphony. I certainly hope you stay for the whole concert because Mahler of course is one of the two great successors of LvB (the other being Brahms) who advanced the symphony as a form the way LvB did in his lifetime. (BTW, Anton Bruckner who would also be a significant successor to LvB, is a special case, and in spite of the fact I love many of Bruckner's symphonies ad the "Te Deum", I appreciate the difficulties some people have with his compositions.)
Getting back to Mahler, early in the 20th Century, his symphonies were considered too "difficult" to include in orchestal programs and almost impossible to play! Oops: nowadays, conservatory orchestras offer performances, and this very afternoon, Benjami Zander is conducting the Boston Youth Philharmonic in Mahler's Second Symphony. Many "Sundays in the Church of Beethoven" have featured adagios and andantes from the String Quartets (but not the Third Movement of the "Hammerklavier Sonata"; why not?), pieces that undoubtedly inspired the slow movements of Mahler's Symphonies. His Fifth Symphony's "Adagietto" has been excerpted numerous times due to its shimmering beauty, oh and yes, its relative brevity.
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