Gems from 'Mahler's orchestra'

Broadcast performances by the New York Philharmonic are now available in a CD set. The historic pieces are, for the most part, wonderful music.

In the last few years, more and more American orchestras have been issuing commemorative sets, usually culled from broadcast archives, of their own performances. The pioneer in such efforts was the Chicago Symphony, but its example has been followed by other major orchestras, including those in Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and, most recently, New York.

The economic motivation is easy to understand. Given current fees, the time that it takes an orchestra nowadays to record enough material to fill a 70-minute CD is likely to cost considerably more than $200,000. But these commemorative sets are cheap to produce. The orchestra's musicians sign a waiver on royalties, and most of the experts and collectors who supply their expertise to the project usually contribute their services. It's a bargain for the orchestras involved.

The latest of these sets -- the New York Philharmonic's 12-CD "The Mahler Broadcasts, 1948-1982" -- costs $225, plus handling and shipping, but it's a bargain for everyone involved. It's filled with mostly wonderful, historically important performances, and includes interviews with Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, John Barbirolli and the composer's daughter, Anna. In addition, there are 500 pages of superb annotations.

The Philharmonic likes to call itself "Mahler's orchestra." This angers not only some European orchestras with longer associations with the great composer- conductor -- such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam -- but also some snobs, mostly Eurotrash intellectuals and those weak-minded Americans who believe everything on the other side of the Atlantic is better than it is here.

Mahler may have spent only two years -- unhappy ones, at that -- as the Philharmonic's music director. But after 1933, performances of the music of this great composer were confined almost entirely to the United States and the Soviet Union. The reason that most performances of Mahler's music, between 1933 and the end of the 1950s, took place in New York was simple. Many of the conductors closely associated with the Philharmonic -- Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Stokowski and, of course, Leonard Bernstein -- proselytized tirelessly for Mahler's music.

Generally speaking, the sound of these performances is excellent -- much better than on unauthorized European pirates. The set contains no Bernstein performances because he and this orchestra recorded almost all of Mahler's music and those recordings are still available.