YouTube’s algorithm has served me a 2019 performance of Mahler’s string orchestration of Schubert’s Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) by Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the New World Symphony, the Miami ensemble that he founded as a post-graduate finishing school for young orchestral musicians.
This caught my eye because the New World Symphony sends many of its alumni to orchestras of the size and pay grade of the Richmond Symphony, and later on to major orchestras. A number of the players in this five-year-old performance are undoubtedly first-chairs somewhere today. Also because Tilson Thomas, while lauded for his Mahler, has not built his reputation on interpretations of earlier “core” Austro-German composers such as Schubert. What would he make of this classically structured but romantically charged score?
A lot, it turns out: If you’ve heard the Mahler “Death and the Maiden,” it was almost certainly played by a chamber orchestra. Tilson Thomas musters a complement of strings large enough to populate a Mahler symphony. (The Schubert arrangement, made in 1896, is roughly contemporaneous with Mahler’s first three symphonies.)
A beefier ensemble adds expressive gravitas and warmer, richer sonority (especially in bass lines); and, conducted attentively as it is here, gives greater prominence to Mahler’s articulative and dynamic retouchings. I heard details in this performance that I had never heard before.
Forty minutes well spent: