Frans Bouwman about his Mahler X for 2 piano’s

As a boy my father played for me the Decca 1926 78 rpm vinyl of Mahler’s Adagietto by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg. I was hooked straight away on Mahler!
I started to listen to Mahler 4 Frits Reiner/Lisa della Casa; Mahler 1 Bruno Walter; Mahler 3 and 5 Leonard Bernstein NYP; Mahler 6 Sir John Barbirolli New Phil. 1961 and Mahler 9 Barbirolli BPO and the rest. At the time of the Mahler centenial in 1960 Mahler’s music was still considered by many as too long, overdone and excentric. Now Mahler’s music is so popular that people pay exhorbitant prices to hear just one symphony live!

As a holiday job I worked in the public library, music section of The Hague in the Netherlands and caught my first glimpse of the 1924 Zsolnay facsimile of Mahler’s Unfinished Tenth. I was fascinated and started copying the manuscript, totally unaware of other editors of this intriguing material. When studying piano at the Royal Conservatory for Music in The Hague, I made a partial two piano version of this symphony which I played with my teacher Gerard Hengeveld. In 1975 the Residentie Orchestra, under Jean Martinon, gave the Dutch premiere of Mahler 10 in the Performing Version of Deryck Cooke et al. (David and Colin Mathews and Berthold Goldschmidt) I borrowed the score and with it improved my own then already completed two piano version. This version I performed with Peter Beijersbergen as well as Katy Satur my wife. In 1986 there was the Utrecht Mahler 10 symposium organised bij the Dutch Mahler Society under Rob Becqué. I was a working member of this committee. Apart from the symposium, where several well known Mahler experts spoke, three Performing Versions were programmed: Cooke et al. with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Simon Rattle, the Performing Version by Clinton Carpenter with the Brabant/Gelderland orchestra under Theodor Bloomfield and the Remo Mazzetti Performing Version with the Radio Orchestra under Gaetano Delogu. The Performing Version by Remo Mazzetti replaced the Joseph Wheeler Performing Version as there was no fourth orchestra available. Due to bad rehearsal planning the Mazzetti Performing Version was not fully performed. Because of this I hastily changed my two piano Cooke et al. version into a Mazzetti two piano version. (In hindsight an unnecessary exercise). As a thank you for proofreading the Mazzetti orchestral parts for the radio orchestra, the Dutch Radio consented to record this two piano version which was played by my wife and myself on November 9 1986. This recording was never broadcast but put on YouTube where it is still accessible! At the request of Rob Becqué I made a Mahler 10 bibliography.

During the 1986 symposium I thought it would be a good idea to have all available Performing Versions judged by an expert panel and thus making the ‘ultimate’ PV. Real soon I realised that this was a silly idea. Who would be in the panel to really judge and who would take it upon himself to notate this ultimate realisation? So I limited this idea to scholarly notate in a chronological manner all of Gustav’s notations of his Unfinished Tenth Sympony. This became my opus magnum which I published in 2017 by Donemus. As a spin off of this work, I reworked my two old two piano versions. This time with the knowledge and experience gathered over many years by working or discussing with David and Colin Mathews, Clinton Carpenter, Remo Mazzetti, the brother of Joe Wheeler, Robert Olson, Rudolph Barshai, Yoel Gamzou and others. This piano arrangement was equally published in 2017 by Donemus and will be played trice in September 2024 by Maarten van Veen and Ralph van Raat. In 2019 I published, also with Donemus, my solo piano version of Mahler 10. There now exist three solo piano arrangements of Mahler 10/Cooke et al: one by Stevenson/White, one by Iain Farrington and one by Frans Bouwman. The latter one making use of his knowledge of Mahler’s manuscript and the other performing versions. It would be brilliant if an expert would take it upon himself to write a critique about these three solo piano arrangements of Gustav Mahler’s Unfinished Tenth Symphony!

(In September 2023 Maarten van Veen and Bobby Mitchell performed my two piano arrangement of Mahler 9. This arrangement will be published shortly, also by Donemus).