The passion to bring out al those human emotions that can be felt - suspected from reading the score - in Mahler's 5th does not seem to be a challenge for Maestro Zander because that's what he naturally has in him. There are two other things that I would consider challenges, still. What was the frame of reference to the composer - e.g. in one of the Van Beethoven ("van" is part of the Dutch/Flemish family names) symphonies he clearly had the spirit of enlightenment as reference and quoted relevant melodies that played a role in the history of that movement. If we don't know that we may not pick those out and cannot place accents where they were supposed to be. The building blocks must become recognisable in the storytelling and help allocate our passion in the right place. Second is a variant of the former point that I would consider more technical. I saw a documentary about master pianist Nikita Magaloff with built-in master class. Recorded in and around his home at the bank of lake Geneva. One of his students played Chopin music and was fluent and flawless, it seemed. When finished, Magaloff asked the pianist to go to bars x..y in the sheet music and play them as a fugue. What sounded technical and not attractive all of a sudden sounded like it belonged. Same notes. Same tempo. That student, later, became a professor at a conservatory (university music school). Try playing Debussy's Prélude "Minstrels" without reference and it becomes very technical where all the irony is lost. Music like Mahler's probably has many levels like this. In the case of Van Beethoven, music can be played in a certain way for more than a century and all of a sudden, the deeper philosophical understanding and identification of songs he quoted makes for a much more appreciable performance. I'd argue that that's the challenge.
Love him
I can literally hear myself playing in the background
Mahler seemed to love brass 😅😊
The passion to bring out al those human emotions that can be felt - suspected from reading the score - in Mahler's 5th does not seem to be a challenge for Maestro Zander because that's what he naturally has in him.
There are two other things that I would consider challenges, still.
What was the frame of reference to the composer - e.g. in one of the Van Beethoven ("van" is part of the Dutch/Flemish family names) symphonies he clearly had the spirit of enlightenment as reference and quoted relevant melodies that played a role in the history of that movement. If we don't know that we may not pick those out and cannot place accents where they were supposed to be. The building blocks must become recognisable in the storytelling and help allocate our passion in the right place.
Second is a variant of the former point that I would consider more technical. I saw a documentary about master pianist Nikita Magaloff with built-in master class. Recorded in and around his home at the bank of lake Geneva. One of his students played Chopin music and was fluent and flawless, it seemed. When finished, Magaloff asked the pianist to go to bars x..y in the sheet music and play them as a fugue. What sounded technical and not attractive all of a sudden sounded like it belonged. Same notes. Same tempo. That student, later, became a professor at a conservatory (university music school).
Try playing Debussy's Prélude "Minstrels" without reference and it becomes very technical where all the irony is lost.
Music like Mahler's probably has many levels like this. In the case of Van Beethoven, music can be played in a certain way for more than a century and all of a sudden, the deeper philosophical understanding and identification of songs he quoted makes for a much more appreciable performance.
I'd argue that that's the challenge.
Mediocre nothing special with zander