Youth's magic horn

That photo was taken by me as my wife handed out sweets to these young Senegalese footballers. (Football followers will appreciate the irony of my engagement with both Morocco and Senegal.)  During our recent travels in Senegal we were struck both by the physical presence and beauty of the people, and by the shocking poverty. 60% of the population is under 30 years old, which is at least partly due to a Senegalese husband being legally allowed up to four wives.

'The Youth's Magic Horn' (Des Knaben Wunderhorn) is the anthology of folk poems from which Gustav Mahler's  'Poor Children's Begging Song' (Armer Kinder Betterlied) for boy's and women's choirs and contralto soloist in his Third Symphony is taken. My recent listening has included returning to Jascha Horenstein's recording of this symphony. Horenstein (1898 to 1973) was a truly great interpreter of of Bruckner and Mahler, and his recording of the latter's Third Symphony is among the finest committed to record. 

For the Unicorn-Kanchana sessions the London Symphony Orchestra was on top form, and the recording shows its age by being better in every respect than recent recordings of this work. Today recordings are considered 'great' if they make a state-of-the-art audio system sound state-of-the-art. But a truly superlative recording, like this Mahler Three engineered by Bob Auger, makes a state-of-the-art system disappear, and that is the acid test of recorded sound quality. When I listened to Jascha Horenstein's Mahler Three yesterday evening my B&W Nautilus 803 speakers vanished, and I was sitting in Croydon's Fairfield Halls in 1970 listening to a master Mahlerian at work.