But Bernstein redrew the map with Mahler at dead center, a paradigm shift that has affected our sense of music ever since.
Leopold Stokowski, Bruno Walter and Dimitri Mitropoulos had long championed Mahler in New York, and a parallel Mahler revival was in progress in Europe, spearheaded by John Barbirolli. It would be untrue to say that Bernstein put Mahler on the map, though his words sometimes gave that impression. Sony Classical's new remastered, repackaged bargain-price edition of Bernstein's first recordings of the complete Mahler symphonies, originally made for Columbia, takes listeners back to those days, when the release of the ''White Album'' and that of Mahler's Seventh Symphony were equally revelatory. No one understood this historical moment more fully, more passionately and, some might say, more opportunistically than Leonard Bernstein. MUSICOLOGISTS of the future may well term the 1960's the decade of the Beatles and Gustav Mahler: the remarkable, unexpected flowering of Liverpudlian lyricism and the re-emergence, at the centenary of his birth, of a composer many critics saw only as a relic of a vanished Vienna.
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