Bride of the Wind. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

Bride of the Wind. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Music by Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler, and Stephen Endelman. DG 289 469 584-2.

"Bride of the Wind" is, as you probably know, director Bruce Beresford's film biography of Alma Mahler and her conquests of quite a few of Vienna's leading artists in the early part of the twentieth century. Among the men she married was Gustav Mahler, so the film dwells mostly on his music and a little of hers.

This DG soundtrack album seems mainly to serve as an introduction to Gustav's music, and folks who already own most of the composer's symphonies and songs may safely ignore it. The soundtrack is made up of bits and pieces of Mahler's output, plus a few new transitional items written by Stephen Endelman. The Mahler excerpts are played by the Vienna Philharmonic led by Pierre Boulez and Claudio Abbado, depending. These extracts, taken from previously released DG albums, include the First Movements of the First, Third, and Sixth Symphonies, the Sixth Movement of the Third Symphony, and the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony. The only piece that works well out of context is the Adagietto, Gustav's "love letter" to his wife, probably because it's so often heard out of context. Boulez plays it longingly, lovingly, and, as tradition has directed, very slowly.

It's all beautiful music, to be sure, but I don't think it will be of much interest to the serious music lover or the audiophile. The disc is transferred in good but "ordinary good" sound, if you know what I mean; and while the performances by Boulez and Abbado, and a new one by Rene Fleming and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, are also uniformly good, they are too fragmented to care much about. The disc might serve as a newcomer's guide, perhaps, to a little of Mahler's music or as a souvenir of the film, but little else.