From Music Hound: Gustav And Lenny

Leonard Bernstein was music director of the New York Philharmonic for many years. Mahler was there when the orchestra was founded in 1909-10. Bernstein was Bruno Walter's deputy at the NYP in the 1940s, Walter was Mahler's deputy at the Vienna Opera circa 1900. Given such a lineage, it is fitting that it was Bernstein more than any other conductor apart from Walter, who made us really listen to Mahler. In part this was an accident of technological development. Mahler's symphonies are very long and very complex (Martin Scorsese has said of Stanley Kubrick "one of his pictures are equivalent to ten of somebody else's"--the same could be said of Mahler's symphonies), so the LP record made them accessible in ways hitherto impossible. Bernstein took brilliant advantage of this in producing the first complete recorded cycle of Mahler's symphonies in the 1960s. In fact, he recorded them three times: in the 60s with the NYP, in the 80s with the NYP and Concertgebouw, and in the 70s with the Vienna Phil. in a series of TV specials now on DVD. It is the latter cycle that many consider his best, and from which we will begin today's Mahler fest with a performance of the fourth symphony--considered by many to be Mahler's most accessible work.