First Monday at Jordan Hall

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Hours:	8:00 p.m.
In/Outdoor:	Indoor
Cost:	Free
Category:	Music & Concerts

In 1876, Gustav Mahler, then 16 and a student at the Vienna Conservatory, wrote the beginnings of a piano quartet. He completed the first movement in A-minor and about 24 bars of a scherzo. He never finished the work and it remained unknown until its rediscovery in the 1960s.

The Russian/German composer Alfred Schnittke took the fragmentary scherzo as a germ for his own 1988 work. A composer some have called the Mahler of his day, Schnittke had created a new style, 'polystylism', in which he juxtaposed and combined music of various styles past and present.

He once wrote, 'The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so.' His fascinating mash-up of gestures and ideas in the Piano Quartet suggested to the writer Seth Brodsky “…the faded handwriting of one composer covered over by the handwriting of another, only to bleed through after all.”

For NEC’s Mahler Unleashed, the Schnittke work underscores a thread running through the entire festival—Mahler’s works reimagined, his own reworking or arranging of other composers’ music, and his borrowing of indigenous styles and idioms for his own works.

WEBSITE

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necmusic.edu/first-monday-jordan-hall-0

LOCATION

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30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA, 02115 map
Phone: 617-585-1148