NEW HAVEN, November 28, 2010: Classical music observer, Norman Lebrecht will stop off in New Haven on his book tour of his latest treasure WHY MAHLER?. The New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) and the Yale School of Music will host a lecture on Wednesday, November 17, 5:00pm at Sudler Hall, 100 Wall St., on the Yale University campus. This event is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
2010 marks the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth, and 2011 the 100th anniversary of the death of this extraordinary composer, whose music was condemned in his lifetime but which has now displaced Beethoven’s as a box-office draw. Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life, and his latest book WHY MAHLER? reflects Lebrecht’s efforts at following Mahler’s every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, and talking to those who knew him. In doing so, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times, and as a maker of our modern world.
Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and New York, the music that he wrote was originally dismissed. “Pages of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today Mahler exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores. Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But those were only the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener.
“Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.” WHY MAHLER? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.
Norman Lebrecht has written several best-selling works of nonfiction, including The Maestro Myth and Who Killed Classical Music? He is also the award-winning author of the novels The Song of Names and The Game of Opposites. He writes regularly for Bloomberg.com and The Wall Street Journal, and he presents The Lebrecht Interview series on BBC Radio 3 and The Record Doctor on WNYC. He lives in London.
For more information contact the NHSO at (203) 865-0831 or visit www.newhavensymphony.org.
