To the best of our knowledge, the full Symphony No. 10 in any
version has only been played west of Chicago in San Francisco
by Leonard Slatkin, and possibly also in Los Angeles by Simon
Rattle. Moreover, the final version prepared by the British composer
and musicologist, Joe Wheeler, has been played in the entire USA
only once before, some thirty years ago, and then to an uncorrected
score by a student orchestra! All Mahlerites who are familiar
with the often played Deryck Cooke version, and who have heard
the new recordings of the other versions by Clinton Carpenter
(who actually was the first to attempt a full version) and Remo
Mazzetti (the latest version), will be entranced by Wheeler's
transparent and beautifully rendered version of Mahler's remarkable
fully-sketched out structure.
The symphony was sketched in great haste in 1910, while he was
preparing for the première of his monumental Eighth in
Munich, coping with his wife Alma's affair with Walter Gropius,
and deeply worried about his health. He believed incorrectly
that he had a "fatal" heart defect, and was doomed.
He did die in 1911, but of an infection which finally lodged
in his heart, and which might have been overcome, had he not been
psyched out from taking better care of himself.
Jack Diether, the Canadian/American Mahlerite and program writer, was of the opinion that had he lived to finish it, the Tenth would have been Mahler's greatest symphony. Donald Mitchell says of the Tenth that it is a remarkably worked-out sketch, pointing the way to much that would have been quite new in Mahler's works, had he lived. Richard Specht wrote that Mahler told him that the Tenth was "fully prepared" in the sketches.