Mahler/Cooke: Symphony No 10 (transcribed Stevenson & White)

This is a curious disc, on which Christopher White plays a piano transcription of Deryck Cooke's performing version of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony. The Scottish pianist and composer Ronald Stevenson was responsible for the keyboard arrangement of the symphony's opening Adagio, the only movement that Mahler more or less completed, and White has made his own versions of the other four. But why he, or Stevenson for that matter, should choose to transcribe what is obviously the most problematic of Mahler's symphonies rather than one of the earlier works, remains unclear, and what insights such an exercise provides into either Mahler's original or Cooke's masterly realisation are hazy, too. Certainly, with no orchestral clothing to cushion its dissonances, the music seems more anguished, more modernist, especially in the monumental first movement. But otherwise the restricted range of instrumental colour, combined with the inability of any piano to convey the full depth of sound on which the symphony depends, makes White's efforts seem rather pointless, for all their good intentions.