First of all, I thank The Berkshire Eagle for continuing to publish reviews of Tanglewood.(Only one other newspaper seems to be doing it.) Secondly, thanks to Andrew Pincus for his usually insightful and well written comments on those concerts. Although I take great exception to his throw away comment about the Mahler 1st,(What he really meant was that the audience got a big bang for its buck.) the perfromance of the Mahler was the way the composer would have liked: brassy, very, very, big (loud) and to use Picus' earlier word describing Mahler interpretations, neurotic. Despite some of the bloopers in playing, the emotional effect was so overwheoming that "brassy and unfocused" playing seems off the mark. The exhaustive biography of Mahler by H. de la Grange (4 volumes) is filled with information on how to pesent all of the Mahler symphonies. Neurotic is a perjoritive word, and there are much better words to describe the hugeness of Mahler's symphonies. After all, they are not Hyden nor Mozart. The reccomendation would be to reevaluate the seming negative bias toward Mahler seen in this review. I would say this to the reviewer of a New York paper who gave even less to the Mahler 1st symphony by using only one sentence and at that, was an empty coment.
Keep up the reviews!