Leonard Bernstein conducts Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

Mozart

Clarinet Concerto in A major, K622

Mahler

Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor

Peter Schmidl (clarinet)
Vienna Philharmonic
Leonard Bernstein (conductor)


Reviewed by:

Reviewed: 26 August, 2020
Venue:

Bernstein appeared only twice at the Proms. In tonight’s selection from the Proms archive, we hear the first of those appearances, from 1987. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, with its sublime slow movement, is the composer at his sunniest and most mellow, despite the fact that he was to die two months after its completion. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a work especially associated with Bernstein, is by contrast the urgent work of a composer starting a new adventure, charged with new musical possibilities and a new love, expressed with impossible tenderness in its famous Adagietto.

Read Past Reviews on the Classical Source

This performance was taken from the BBC Proms on 10th September 1987 – twelve years before the Classical Source was born.

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