"As for the older British school of conductors not taking much interest in Mahler, I think Jeffrey is unfair to at least Wood and Boult. Wood gave several performances in the early days"
I certainly had no idea that Boult performed so much Mahler in his career.
As for Wood, I'd suspected that he might have included some Mahler in his concerts due to the fact that he was willing to programme works that were regarded as modern "novelties" to the audiences of the time.
I have Wood's score of Miaskovsky's 6th Symphony - a work I actually prefer to any of the Mahler symphonies - and I find it interesting that it's in miniature format and the majority of Wood's markings consist of enlargements in blue-pencil of the metronome markings in the printed score and the beat requirements . It seems to me - and I may be doing Wood an injustice here - that, if he needed to remind himself of the tempi in this way- he might not have fully-digested this lengthy, complex and difficult score (it's said that no-one was ever quite sure wnether John Ogdon had learnt the music he was performing or was sight-reading due to his exceptional ability to do so) and I wonder if his commitment to Mahler might have been on the same level.
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