"deryck Cooke"

As we all know, Gustav Mahler didn't actually compose a 10th symphony, or if he did, it was "Das Lied von der Erde," which he didn't call his 10th symphony because he was superstitious enough to believe that since Beethoven died before he could write a 10th, so might Mahler. He turned out to be right. Of a "10th" symphony, he wrote only the first movement more or less completely; the second is half done; the third is mostly unorchestrated; and the last two are well structured but remain almost entirely unorchestrated.

• 55 CD original jacket, original couplings collection celebrating Maestro Riccardo Chailly’s 40 years on Decca
• Includes complete cycles of Beethoven, Brahms (x2), Schumann (x2), Bruckner and Mahler
• Featuring the orchestras with whom Chailly has been most closely associated: the Gewandhausorchester, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin

Chailly's Mahler Tenth has certainly withstood the test of time since its original release in 1988. Simon Rattle's new Berlin recording offers perhaps a more highly inflected, characterful performance, but Chailly has both the better playing and sound, and this pays particular dividends in the dark, rich string textures of the opening and closing movements. Both Rattle and Chailly use Deryck Cooke's revised performing version (Chailly sticks to it more literally than does Rattle), and this remains the edition of choice. Recent releases of other completion attempts, including a pretty ghastly one by Remo Mazzetti, only confirm the excellence of Cooke's work.

This collection of previously unreleased live recordings celebrates the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra’s centenary and the ten-year residency, from 2008 to 2018, of its principal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians – a kind of Holy Grail of 20th-century music. Recognized as an intensely personal work, it was initially consigned to respectful oblivion, but over the years, Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow, released more and more of Mahler’s sketches for publication, and gradually it became clear that he had in fact bequeathed an entire five-movement symphony in short score (i.e. written on three or four staves). Of this, nearly half had reached the stage of a draft orchestration, while the rest contained indications of the intended instrumentation.