Paul Baily – mastering engineer.
Klemperer once called Mahler his creator spiritus. But he told his biographer Peter Heyworth, “I’m not a silly, enthusiastic boy: I don’t like everything he wrote”. Despite having assisted the composer at a performance, Klemperer did not care for Mahler’s Third Symphony, nor for the Fifth. He gave up the First after just one attempt, and could never quite bring himself to conduct the Sixth or the Eighth – until the end of his life when a London concert of the latter became one of his unrealised fantasies for the New Philharmonia’s 1971/72 season. In autumn 1905, as a student in Berlin, he had conducted the off-stage band for performances of the Second given by Oskar Fried. Mahler himself attended and instructed Klemperer on how to get the proper effect he wanted from the brass – “blaring, but from a long way away”. He was pleased with the result and congratulated the young conductor. A short time later Klemperer played the first movement’s off-stage side-drum when Mahler took over from Arthur Nikisch to conduct the Third Symphony in Berlin. Determining now to call on the composer in Vienna for a reference, Klemperer, as visiting card, brought his own piano arrangement of the symphony, playing the Scherzo from memory (a reduction which seems to have been lost during Klemperer’s wartime years in America). Mahler wrote to his wife Alma how impressed he was and, eventually, wrote out a most complete testimonial on a visiting card: “Gustav Mahler recommends Herr Klemperer as an outstanding musician, who despite his youth is already very experienced and is predestined for a conductor’s career. He vouches for the successful outcome of any probationary appointment...”
From the booklet note Mike Ashman, 2010
