Gustav Mahler

TO UNDERSTAND just how significant a cultural phenomenon Gustav Mahler's music has become in the 100 years since the Austrian composer died, look no further than Boston's own Frasier Crane and Rebecca Howe, the psychiatrist and bar manager beloved by fans of the classic sitcom "Cheers. " In a double episode from the show's final season in 1993, Mahler looms large. Frasier sets the stage, reporting on a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of Mahler's Third Symphony - the piece is "one of my absolute favorites," he declares.

"Here Nature roars," Gustav Mahler wrote of the beginning of his Seventh Symphony, in which the tenor horn - a band instrument rarely seen in classical orchestras - makes a mighty, and mighty strange, sound. The Seventh has been nicknamed "The Song of the Night," but the first movement, at least, is more like "Where the Wild Things Are. " This is one of Mahler's least-performed symphonies (only the Eighth, which calls for hundreds of voices, turns up less often), and one of his least-understood works, but Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra have done well by it in...

PICK OF THE DAY Simply the best In a few weeks, k.d. lang will turn 50, a golden milestone surpassed only by the platinum sound of her Grammy-winning voice. "She's the best singer of her generation," according to the best of his (that would be Mr. Bennett). Kathryn Dawn Lang and her musical genres are in town tonight. 8 p.m. $50-$75. The Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont St., Boston. 800-745-3000. www.thewilbur.com TODAY Get to the Root of it We would never discard "Garbage Man," sit out "Dance in the Middle," or abandon "Bad Son" from the CD "Stereo Rodeo" by Pittsburgh's Rusted Root ....

Vienna is a city that laughs and cries at the same time, as the string ensemble A Far Cry demonstrated Sunday afternoon in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's new Calderwood Hall. Ranging from the 17th century (Johann Heinrich Schmelzer) to the 20th (Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), with a stop in between for Mozart, the program plumbed emotional depths but never lost its sparkle. A sense of play was evident throughout. Schmelzer's "Die Fechtschule" - one of some 150 ballets he composed for Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I - incorporates a fencing match into its penultimate movement.

"Here Nature roars," Gustav Mahler wrote of the beginning of his Seventh Symphony, in which the tenor horn - a band instrument rarely seen in classical orchestras - makes a mighty, and mighty strange, sound. The Seventh has been nicknamed "The Song of the Night," but the first movement, at least, is more like "Where the Wild Things Are. " This is one of Mahler's least-performed symphonies (only the Eighth, which calls for hundreds of voices, turns up less often), and one of his least-understood works, but Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra have done well by it in...

Vienna is a city that laughs and cries at the same time, as the string ensemble A Far Cry demonstrated Sunday afternoon in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's new Calderwood Hall. Ranging from the 17th century (Johann Heinrich Schmelzer) to the 20th (Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), with a stop in between for Mozart, the program plumbed emotional depths but never lost its sparkle. A sense of play was evident throughout. Schmelzer's "Die Fechtschule" - one of some 150 ballets he composed for Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I - incorporates a fencing match into its...

Norman Lebrecht is an enthusiast. The author, a music columnist for the London Evening Standard, may don a critical cap in his newspaper writing and as an interviewer for the BBC, but when it comes to Gustav Mahler, he’s an unabashed fan. This passion, for good and ill, infuses his latest book. “Why Mahler?’’ as Lebrecht explains in his introduction, is not meant to be a biography. Since the author, a disaffected rock fan, discovered Mahler, a variety of such straightforward life stories have been published, chronicling the life of the Austrian...

LENOX — It is 1947, and we are in Switzerland with Willem Mengelberg, the disgraced conductor of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw orchestra. When he’s not conducting his phantom musicians (with the aid of scratchy vinyl on a wind-up Victrola) or communing with absent friends, he rails against the “pious Calvinists’’ at home who have exiled him here. Bitterly, he reflects that he has spent his career creating music for a philistine “herd of sheep,’’ then explodes: “Is there a more horrendous human tragedy than that: wasting the sublime on boors?

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, Benjamin Zander, spent last season exploring the music of Gustav Mahler, and the first concert of their new season was a coda to that, offering works from the end of Mahler's musical life. These eloquent pieces, largely about saying goodbye, made a fitting bookend for Zander's Mahler foray. If only the farewell had resonated as it should have. The concert began with the Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony. From its opening -- an unaccompanied viola line of indeterminate harmony -- through...

LENOX - There is a famous story about the conductor Bruno Walter paying a visit to Gustav Mahler at his lakeside hut during a period when the great composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Walter arrived and was taking in the view of the awe-inspiring mountains when the composer quipped that his friend didn’t really have to bother looking. He had written it all into his symphony. The anecdote, from Walter’s book on Mahler, may be exaggerated or invented outright but it captures something about the myth of this composer as transcriber of the natural sublime.

PICK OF THE DAY Simply the best In a few weeks, k.d. lang will turn 50, a golden milestone surpassed only by the platinum sound of her Grammy-winning voice. "She's the best singer of her generation," according to the best of his (that would be Mr. Bennett). Kathryn Dawn Lang and her musical genres are in town tonight. 8 p.m. $50-$75. The Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont St., Boston. 800-745-3000. www.thewilbur.com TODAY Get to the Root of it We would never discard "Garbage Man," sit out "Dance in the Middle," or abandon "Bad Son" from the CD "Stereo Rodeo" by Pittsburgh's Rusted Root ....

TO UNDERSTAND just how significant a cultural phenomenon Gustav Mahler's music has become in the 100 years since the Austrian composer died, look no further than Boston's own Frasier Crane and Rebecca Howe, the psychiatrist and bar manager beloved by fans of the classic sitcom "Cheers. " In a double episode from the show's final season in 1993, Mahler looms large. Frasier sets the stage, reporting on a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of Mahler's Third Symphony - the piece is "one of my absolute favorites," he declares.

Norman Lebrecht is an enthusiast. The author, a music columnist for the London Evening Standard, may don a critical cap in his newspaper writing and as an interviewer for the BBC, but when it comes to Gustav Mahler, he’s an unabashed fan. This passion, for good and ill, infuses his latest book. “Why Mahler?’’ as Lebrecht explains in his introduction, is not meant to be a biography. Since the author, a disaffected rock fan, discovered Mahler, a variety of such straightforward life stories have been published, chronicling the life of the Austrian...

LENOX — It is 1947, and we are in Switzerland with Willem Mengelberg, the disgraced conductor of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw orchestra. When he’s not conducting his phantom musicians (with the aid of scratchy vinyl on a wind-up Victrola) or communing with absent friends, he rails against the “pious Calvinists’’ at home who have exiled him here. Bitterly, he reflects that he has spent his career creating music for a philistine “herd of sheep,’’ then explodes: “Is there a more horrendous human tragedy than that: wasting the sublime on boors?

LENOX - There is a famous story about the conductor Bruno Walter paying a visit to Gustav Mahler at his lakeside hut during a period when the great composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Walter arrived and was taking in the view of the awe-inspiring mountains when the composer quipped that his friend didn’t really have to bother looking. He had written it all into his symphony. The anecdote, from Walter’s book on Mahler, may be exaggerated or invented outright but it captures something about the myth of this composer as transcriber of the natural sublime.

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, Benjamin Zander, spent last season exploring the music of Gustav Mahler, and the first concert of their new season was a coda to that, offering works from the end of Mahler's musical life. These eloquent pieces, largely about saying goodbye, made a fitting bookend for Zander's Mahler foray. If only the farewell had resonated as it should have. The concert began with the Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony. From its opening -- an unaccompanied viola line of indeterminate harmony -- through...

LEIPZIG, Germany -- The bronze statue in front of St. Thomas Church shows a great man with his coat pockets hanging inside out like some scruffy teenager. The turned-out pockets on Johann Sebastian Bach are actually a humanizing touch on the part of the sculptor and meant to convey the fact that Bach, who fathered 12 children, was almost always broke during the 27 years he lived in Leipzig until his death, at 65, in 1750. The city's official music director and responsible for the music in its principal churches, he was constantly trying to get more money from local authorities, usually without much...

It's the dreaded sound at any live performance — a ringing cellphone. That's what happened Tuesday night at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall toward the end of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony by the New York Philharmonic. Conductor Alan Gilbert stopped the orchestra until the phone was silenced. Betsy Vorce, speaking for Lincoln Center, says an announcement is usually made before every performance telling audience members to turn off their phones. If a device does go off, ushers discreetly ask the owner to turn it off. This time, when the iPhone went...

LEIPZIG, Germany -- The bronze statue in front of St. Thomas Church shows a great man with his coat pockets hanging inside out like some scruffy teenager. The turned-out pockets on Johann Sebastian Bach are actually a humanizing touch on the part of the sculptor and meant to convey the fact that Bach, who fathered 12 children, was almost always broke during the 27 years he lived in Leipzig until his death, at 65, in 1750. The city's official music director and responsible for the music in its principal churches, he was constantly trying to get more money from local authorities, usually without much...