Gustav Mahler. Tenth Symphony (Fragment)

Gustav Mahler. Tenth Symphony (Fragment)
Arranged for Piano Four Hands

  This piano arrangement is associated with the music of a composer who was just as, if not more important to Shostakovich than Stravinsky.
  Shostakovich presumably turned to Mahler’s Tenth Symphony in the second half of the 1920s. At that time Mahler’s works became one of the central events in the Leningrad Philharmonic’s concert seasons, primarily thanks to Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich’s friend and untiring advocate of Mahler’s heritage.
  Mahler’s influence on Shostakovich is a well-known fact. It stands to reason that such an event as the discovery of a new Mahler score could not have escaped Shostakovich’s attention.
  Mahler’s Tenth Symphony is an unfinished work; only its first movement, Adagio, has reached us in the form of a full score, which Shostakovich used in his arrangement. Adagio was published for the first time by the composer’s widow, Alma Mahler, in the facsimile edition of the full collection of the author’s
drafts for the Tenth Symphony.
  Shostakovich undertook this work twice: the composer’s archives contain two manuscripts of the Adagio arrangement. However, neither of the versions is finished, and in both cases, only the exposition section has been arranged (approximately one third of the entire movement). Although the interval between the two manuscripts was most likely minimal, it can be tentatively presumed that the second one, which was largely aimed at reproducing the thematic structure, reflects a later stage in the work. In general, it creates the impression that it was rewritten from a finished text; this is shown by the crossings-out of bars misplaced by accident—a typical error during copying.
  It is interesting that, despite being incomplete, the piano version was clearly used as intended—this is shown by the characteristic worn edges of the pages, indicating that they were frequently turned during performance.
  The arrangements of the Adagio fragment (first movement) of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms have never been published before and have not been performed at concerts. There is only one recording of Stravinsky’s work in Shostakovich’s arrangement, done in the 1980s by Viktoria Postnikova and Irina Schnittke.