THE SUNDAY TIMES:
Mahler's sketched but far from orchestrated 10th Symphony can only be known in a conjectural form, so this version for solo piano is, in a sense, as authoritative as any other presentation; and engrossing it is, played with fervour and intelligence, lent an unmistakable symphonic atmosphere and drama.

The first movement is given in the stylish transcription by Ronald Stevenson — the climactic nine-note dissonance, when it comes, is stomach-churning — and the four others in the young pianist's own skilful version. The second scherzo is tumultuous, the rendition of the military drum thwacks at the opening of the finale suitably shocking. The whole account bristles with intellectual life.
Paul Driver

FANFARE:
The performance on this CD is a transcription by musicologist Ronald Stevenson (first movement) and pianist Christopher White (movements 2 through 5) of the Deryck Cooke performing version of Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony. White's purpose is explained in an essay in the CD booklet: “My intention was, partly, to tap into a tradition with which Mahler in his time would actually have been rather familiar.” This statement comes after a couple of disavowals: The transcription isn't an attempt at “finding our way back to the original Mahler,” nor is it a desire for a “wider dissemination of an unknown work,” since CDs of the several realizations of the symphony are readily available.

There was, indeed, an established tradition of transcribing Mahler symphonies for piano, from Walter's four-hand version of the First to Mahler's own piano rolls, but White goes on to cite Mahler's re-orchestrations of Beethoven, Schumann, and Weber. There is, however, an obvious distinction: Where Mahler was augmenting, White and Stevenson are reducing, as transcriptions for piano of orchestral works inevitably must. The pianist describes his attempts at “quasi-orchestral effects,” though one might ask why a transcription for piano of the 10th would be concerned with matters of orchestration, since it is precisely the lack of much of the orchestration that, for many Mahlerians, disqualifies the symphony from inclusion in the canon. White explains that he considers his piece a “piano commentary on the performing draft” of Mahler's symphony, and it was as such that I approached this recording.

The contrast in tempo between the opening Adagio and the Andante of the first theme is mostly absent here as the opening slows markedly before the principal theme arrives; this is effective, however, in establishing the bleakness of the opening in contrast to the warmth of that first theme. That I was less aware of the absent orchestra than I had anticipated is tribute both to the pianist and to Stevenson's arrangement. The sudden dissonance worked well until the “cry” assigned in the orchestral version to the trumpet; this can't be easily duplicated on the piano, and the busy trills that accompany the nine-note chord aren't a good enough substitute.

White manages the constantly shifting rhythmic accents of the second movement with apparent ease; he also clarifies the tricky counterpoint. The warmly ingratiating Trios are lovely. White allows you to admire Mahler's melodies without regard to the propriety of an orchestral version (though, of course, those of us familiar with any of the versions will probably supply our own much of the time). The “Purgatorio” movement may be the most appealing due to its delightfully satiric character, quite pronounced in this transcription—it could almost be Satie.

The dance element of the fourth movement is very much at the heart of White's transcription; the performance possesses an elastic sense of rhythm and a palpably nostalgic grace. As the movement nears its conclusion, White becomes inventive as he strives to imitate the sound of Mahler's muffled drum: He employs “a complicated trick involving the third pedal and my right forearm to generate extra resonance.” It's an interesting effect, but not the sound we need; here, it's a sharp thwack, more imitative of the hammer blows in the finale of the Sixth, when what we need is a deeper, even dampened, note. For those keeping score, White places the first drum beat at the end of the movement, and begins the fifth movement with the ascending figure in the bass before repeating the drum sound.

The unearthly beauty of the melody that Mahler indicated was to be played by a flute is no less affecting on the piano, another indication that Deryck Cooke was correct: This is, indeed, “pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that.” White captures the burlesque nature of the Allegro section that leads to the quote from the first-movement dissonance with both dexterity and sensitivity; as the music slows to near stasis, the lovely lyrical melody reasserts itself in playing of nobility and heartbreaking poise. This is a song without words, and the piano is just as convincing a medium as the orchestra to convey it.

It is not at all surprising to read in the notes that White's master's degree dissertation focused on the music of Mahler. His transcription is not merely evidence of a familiarity with the Mahlerian idiom; it is infused with a profound understanding of the importance of this work in the larger context of Mahler's symphonic journey. Highly recommended.
Christopher Abbot

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
By now we're so familiar with Mahler's Tenth Symphony as realized by Derych Cooke – his performing version seems, probably justly, to have achieved canonic status – that we tend to forget the facts that (a) there are several other realizations, (b) over half the work – movements 2, 4 and 5 – exists only in particell drafts of considerable complication, ambiguity and varying degrees of definition. If anything, that gives a solo piano interpretation of the materials as much legitimacy as an orchestral one, though the case is slightly different in movements 1 and 3, which Mahler had more or less fashioned into full score. Any piano version of the whole symphony will thus be partly a transcription and partly an imaginative re-creation, a subtle balancing act in interpretation.

The version on this disc is further balanced between two transcribers. Ronald Stevenson's solo piano version of Mahler's great Adagio is one of the most striking feats of transcription that this master of the art has achieved. It dates from 1987, was not premiered until 2002 (in Czechoslovakia, by Alton Chung Ming Chan), and has been seldom performed since. (I heard its UK premiere at St John's, Smith Square on April 13 th , 2008, played by Alton Chung as part of the wonderful three-day ‘Stevenson at 80' festival, which featured amazing feats of musicianship – by no means all in Stevenson repertoire – from an international cast of performers; yet it attracted, as far as I'm aware, precisely nil critical notice in the UK press.)

From the opening bars of Stevenson's transcription of the Adagio we are up against the inalienable fact that the piano cannot sustain any note or harmony at a constant dynamic; they can only decay, or be reinforced by repetition. In this predominantly very slow and sometimes very quiet music, where some of the most telling effects are produced precisely by one voice holding a dissonant or complementary tone against another, a transcriber faces severe challenges and will need all his skill, not only with the fen fingers (just enough for the famously scarifying climactic nine-tone dissonance) but with the pedals too, preferably three of them. Stevenson's paramount achievement in this Adagio, it seems to me, is his success at conveying a real sense of sostenuto throughout, allowing the huge movement to expand at its own pace with no loss of intensity. He has not attempted to render orchestra colour but to re-imagine the movement as piano music. The effect, if anything, is to clarify the polyphonic density of Mahler's thought and intensify the pungency of its dissonance. The nakedness of the voice-leading makes one aware that the lushest harmonies are sustained by girders of steel.

Christopher White plays with dedication and great eloquence - one can understand his admiration for Stevenson's achievement and his wish to give it a wider context. In one sense – though this is not to devalue them – his transcriptions of the other movements are the setting for this jewel of pianistic recreation. White's own success, in movements hardly less difficult to transmute into keyboard terms, seems to me patchier. The ‘Purgatorio', perhaps because of its relative textural simplicity, works excellently as a piano piece, and White's embellishments in the reprise of the opening section seem very much in the virtuoso spirit of the enterprise. The first scherzo, however, stubbornly sounds like a workaday – though effective, and impressively played - reduction of an orchestral score. The second scherzo is extraordinary; the angular, fractured phrases of the opening underline how close to Berg, even to Schoenberg, this music is, and White's transcribing powers seem at their best here for much of its length, though he can find no real equivalent for the sinister percussion-only coda; what is a timbral shock in the orchestral version becomes fairly ordinary piano sonority here. I except from this, however, the baleful deep drum-beat that opens and is recurrent element in the finale, which White renders with brutal vividness. The Langsam opening of this last movement ranks with Stevenson's Adagio for atmosphere and poise, but the finale as a whole from the start of the Allegro moderato , doesn't seem to work so effectively as a piano piece, and the closing pages, for me at least fall short of the necessary intensity and effectiveness. All the same, taken as a whole, this is a version of Mahler's Tenth that should give even the most ardent Mahlerian pause for thought.

While writing this review I had a chance encounter with the Mahler expert Mark Doran, who pointed out that though the disc proclaims itself to be a piano transcription of the Cooke realization, Stevenson's Adagio appears to have been transcribed from an earlier edition. (Having made some comparisons I now think his source was the score produced by Ernst Krenek in 1922 – 23 with contributions by Franz Schalk and Zemlinsky, finally published by Associated Music Publishers in 1951 – before the Cooke, the only generally available source for the Adagio .) Doran also made the point that we should remember that something like this must have been what Mahler himself played to Alma while he was working on the Symphony.

In fact, all the symphonies but the Tenth were actually issued in piano arrangements in or shortly after Mahler's lifetime, so it could be said that this Stevenson-White version has now completed the canon.

White plays with fire and passion throughout, as he must, and shows great skill in negotiating what must often be very difficult textural problems. His tempos are justly chosen and his pedalling superb. The actual recording, made in Rosslyn Hill Chapel, has a rather shallow acoustic, but once one's ears adjust seems perfectly adequate. An utterly absorbing release.
Calum MacDonald

MIDWEST RECORD:
Transcribing a Mahler symphony for piano isn't something you do in your spare time, for fun.  This is serious effort and you are leaving yourself open for serious ridicule if you make a false step.  The piano monks that were hard at work in the transcription here are no slouches as they've managed to capture of grandeur of this symphonic work for solo piano and keep you riveted.  A world premiere recording of the work in this form, it may not be the last time it's done but for a long time you can expect it to stand as the best.
Chris Spector

MUSICWEB:
I quite like a good piano transcription and performance of orchestral work. Discs like Gyorgy Sandor's excellent recital of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra and others on a sadly deleted old CBS release have been a part of my private passions, so the unusual prospect of Gustav Mahler's final unfinished masterpiece, the Symphony No.10 , newly transcribed and performed on the piano, just had to be investigated.
 
This piano transcription follows the Deryck Cooke performing version of Mahler's draft of the orchestral score. Christopher White sums up the aims or “non-intentions” of such a project – making no claims for attempts to reproduce or compete with the orchestra on the piano, while introducing some overt effects in places. The first movement, and the most frequently played of the piece, the Adagio , was transcribed by remarkable musician Ronald Stevenson, the others by Christopher White. The quality of both musicians' work on the score is consistently high.
 
I anticipate being taken to task for any comments I make about this recording, [see comments below] probably in the same way as for another piano recording which came my way some time ago, made by the same engineer. I point this out as a description is made of the recording techniques used for piano music, which would lead one to expect that all should be well. I don't want to be negative, but I find it rather difficult to say very much positive about the sound for this disc. I am sure that Christopher White plays with eminent skill, and he certainly has a remarkable technique – falling short only in places which would have most of us sobbing under the piano long before. I am however not the only one to have found this recording to be ‘lacking in colour', which is a polite way of saying it's pretty awful by most objective modern standards. It's hard to tell; the piano itself may or may not be a good one, but here it sounds a bit twangy, like a much loved and well looked after pub piano, but a pub piano nonetheless. The all important bass which would provide so much dynamic interest, and would underpin those staggering harmonies, is virtually absent. I won't bang on about it, but I'm afraid most of the pleasure I'd anticipated when receiving this disc evaporated almost as soon as the first sounds drifted in through my much too expensive headphones. Monitored through decent speakers makes little difference, and the more decent your speakers, the more insinuating the deficit. It's like paying full price for a concert ticket, and finding yourself listening from the annex through a half open door – very frustrating.
 
There is always some educational value in hearing familiar music through different media, and I do feel this is a serious project which deserves attention. What this performance does seem to highlight is how much editing and refinement Mahler would no doubt have done had he survived to complete the score. We've perhaps become a little too ‘comfortable' with the established orchestral version, and with numerous bare bones exposed in this way there are plenty of places which raise textual question marks. Christopher White is a young pianist whose growing experience will no doubt mean his developing ways and means of dealing with certain passages, and turning them into more convincing music. It strikes me as very tricky to turn the first Scherzo into more than the swathes of rather repetitious struggle which appear here. With more time and space given to the notes, and more sympathetic consideration given to the heft and voicing in places, I'm sure more can be made of this. Maybe this is one movement where the orchestral ‘sound' should lead the pianist. The Purgatorio works perhaps a little better, and in general the least dense sections clearly work best. There are some interesting pedal effects in the opening of the second Scherzo , and White's big drum wallops at the beginning of the Finale are impressive, or would be if... Oh dear, we're back to the recording again.
 
MusicWeb International has covered many versions of this work, and for those interested in orchestral performances I would point readers towards the invaluable and compendious overview of recordings by Tony Duggan. As for this CD, unlike films like ‘Alfie' and ‘The Italian Job' this is one release which in 10 or 15 years time will be ripe for a remake, and one which can with relative confidence be expected to be an improvement on the original.  
Dominy Clements

editor's note: sound (like music) is somewhat subjective - each person's brain interprets sound signals differently. Dominy is a very talented musician and established reviewer, so we respect his views; if we had formulated those same views the CD would not have been released. The recording was made by an engineer whose other piano recordings have been the subject of fulsome praise both on MusicWeb and elsewhere; if it has any fault it is only that a wider soundstage appears to have been used in order to capture the grandeur of the music, so requiring a higher playback volume - and yes, the piano does sound a little more distant than in many modern 'close-up' recordings. However playing the CD on both a high quality system and a cheap home cinema set-up, we find no lack in the bass registers! - Divine Art

and just to show you can't please everyone all the time:

INTERNATIONAL PIANO:
I have a long ingrained loathing for jugglers – if it is a near impossibility to spin eight plates simultaneously, that's probably because plates were designed to be stationary household items from which you eat your dinner. And listening to Christopher White's solo piano Mahler 10 – surely the strangest recorded artefact likely to emerge from this Mahler anniversary year – I heard someone juggling the impossible. Some aspects of White's athleticism and dexterousness are undeniably impressive, but I wonder if this performance really does Mahler any favours.

Reviews elsewhere have questioned why White didn't pick on earlier Mahler symphonies, perhaps no. 5 for which Mahler's piano rolls might set a precedent. That misses the point: White's transcriptions of movements two to five where designed to complement Ronald Stevenson's existing transcription of the first movement and, to be fair, neither man claims this as “authentic” Mahler; the form of words White has concocted suggest a ‘piano commentary' on the ‘performing draft (by Deryck Cooke) of the uncompleted Tenth Symphony'.

But the concept quickly wears thin. The inner complexities of Mahler's Tenth bust through conventional orchestral boundaries and, inevitably, leaves the piano wanting – the nine-note expressionist screech in the first movement translates into a series of weightless tremolos, and the bass drum strikes that herald the last movement becomes hollow, tinny clusters. There just aren't enough strikingly diverse timbres to tell Mahler's story, a situation not helped by a needlessly, one-dimensional recording environment.
Philip Clark