Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony is primarily regarded as the composer's reaction in the summer of 1908 to the diagnosis of a heart ailment, which he received just before writing the first sketches for the work. Mahler was deeply distraught and cannot have known how few years he still had left to live. His processing and exploration of his life experiences, and of valedictions, the meaning of life, death, salvation, life after death and love, always took playce in and through his music. The Ninth Symphony was composed between 1909 and 1920 in Toblach, in a kind of creative frenzy, and was first performed in Vienna on June 26, 1912 by the Vienna Philharmonic, under the baton of Bruno Walter. Mahler had already died on May 18, 1911, and was no longer able to experience the premiere of his last completed work. Willem Mengelberg, the first ardent conductor of the composer's works, wrote in his score: "Mahler's soul sings its farewell!" Mahler's Ninth Symphony represents the culmination of a development process. The progressive chromaticism and maximum utilization of the tonal are here taken to their limits - and, for the first time, beyond them. Indeed, the two movements that fram the work, in particular, depart from the tonal entirely, pointing clearly to the dawn of a new musical epoch. Alban Berg even called this symphony "the first work of New Music".

Three works that are very close to his heart were brought together by Mariss Jansons for this new CD release. Karol Szymanowski’s Third Symphony, which, in addition to gigantic orchestral forces, also calls for a chorus and a tenor soloist, depicts a fantastic sound painting of an idealized Near East, including the setting of a 13th century Persian text. Witold Lutoslawski blends Slavic local color into his 1954 Concerto for Orchestra, has a reference to Béla Bartók in the title, but it is marked by a musical approach all his own, one that reaches all the way into the avant-garde period despite its immediate accessibility. Alexander Tchaikovsky, born in 1946, may be the namesake of a giant of the Russian romantic era, although they are not related to one another in any way. His Symphony No. 4 is a musical appeal for peace. The work, written in 2005 on commission from Yuri Bashmet comprises sound-painting choral passages and a significant solo part for the viola.

Bruckner's symphonies form the backbone of Late Romantic symphonic music. Indeed, he can be said to have reinvented the symphony – something that not even Liszt or Wagner had dared to do in the wake of the groundbreaking masterpieces by Beethoven that until then had ranked as the climax and end-point of the genre. It was Bruckner and, somewhat later, Brahms who sought and found new methods of reviving the symphonic genre and developing it further. In this regard, Bruckner's approach was entirely new.

From the outset, he relied on the sound of the large orchestra, and rather than mixing the individual groups of instruments he tended to either separate them from each other or couple them together like organ registers. Terraced dynamics, that is, the immediate juxtaposition of piano and forte without transition, was also something Bruckner derived from the organ. As a church musician, he had close contact with these and other elements of Baroque music, and they flowed into his symphonies.

As far as dramaturgical development was concerned, he tended to favor Schubert; indeed, it was the organic continuation and alternating interconnection of themes Bruckner had learned from Schubert that also explains the unprecedented performance length of his symphonies.

Bruckner's Nine Symphonies are a constant in the repertoire of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, as in those of all major orchestras. The special feature of the release being presented here by BR KLASSIK is that the recordings are conducted by not only one but a total of four conductors closely associated with the orchestra, all of them proven international Bruckner experts. More than in any other compilation, common features in interpretation (also due to the same orchestra) as well as fascinating differences due to the various interpretive approaches of the respective conductors can all be detected. In these recordings it also becomes clear what brilliant contributions Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons and Lorin Maazel have made over the decades to Bruckner’s symphonic oeuvre.

REVIEW:

Here we have a marvelous collection of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies Nos. 1-9 played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony under the baton of four outstanding conductors. Lorin Maazel recorded the first two symphonies in 1999. He does not provide any new insights, but the performances are thrilling nevertheless. The fifth and sixth symphonies with Haitink are also wonderful interpretations, but Blomstedt’s Ninth and the recordings with Jansons are more fluent and warmer than the other performances. Blomstedt offers an interpretation aimed at salvation, without any fear of death. This positive view is good for the music, but also enables profound moments of contemplation. For Jansons one could summarize and say that Jansons inspires his orchestra to a breathtakingly intense playing. From the very beginning one feels the strong lyrical and luminous power providing an eloquent, rhetoric performance.

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“Increasingly, Shostakovich's music is captivating people all over the world and appealing to their deepest emotions. Almost like no other, it bears witness to a traumatic political epoch while remaining a timeless expression of existential human feeling and experience. For me personally,” said conductor Mariss Jansons, who died last year, “Shostakovich is one of the most serious and sincere composers of them all.” After the Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth Symphonies, BR-KLASSIK is now also releasing the Fifth Symphony by this important composer – performed live by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under its long-time chief conductor Mariss Jansons. After accusations of formalism directed against Shostakovich in a critical Pravda article had forced the composer to withdraw his Fourth Symphony (it remained shelved until after Stalin's death), the Fifth, written in 1937, was a phenomenal success. It premiered on November 21, 1937 under the young conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. During the applause, which it seemed would never end, Mravinsky waved the score above his head for a good half hour - making it quite clear that the applause was for Shostakovich alone. Officially, the work was interpreted as the return of a prodigal son to the guidelines of Stalinist cultural policy. To this day the music has lost none of its fascination, and the Fifth Symphony ranks as one of Shostakovich’s best-known works.

“In the Czech generation of composers after Antonín Dvorák, Josef Suk was probably the one who travelled the furthest in terms of style, and certainly, next to Leoš Janácek, the one who retains the highest claim to international standing,” wrote the musicologist Ludwig Finscher in the classic encyclopedia “Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart”. The music of Suk – violinist, composer and one of the most important Bohemian symphonists - is still relatively rarely heard in Western European concert halls, a situation that should definitely change. With this recording of his second symphony, “Asrael”, BR-KLASSIK makes a strong case for Suk’s impressive and compelling music. In 1891, Josef Suk, having started out as a violinist, became a master student of the world-famous Dvorák. He was regularly invited to the composer’s country house, where he fell in love with his teacher's daughter and married her. - The “Asrael” symphony was written after Dvorák's death, and the death soon afterwards of Suk’s own wife gave the work a new direction – it is dedicated to both of them. The title of Asrael refers to the angel of death from Islamic-Persian mythology: he is a mysterious companion of the human soul from this world to the next. - Suk developed his own musical language in which the solo violin is often involved (as here in the gentle central section of the Andante): The violin was indeed his instrument, and until 1933 he played in the “Bohemian String Quartet”. With the “Asrael” symphony he consciously took up the tradition of a “fate symphony” – associated since Beethoven's Fifth with the key of C minor moving at the end into radiant C major. Ever since its premiere on February 3, 1907 at the Prague National Theatre, “Asrael” has ranked as Suk's most important symphonic work - and as a visionary glimpse into the future.

Admittedly, Franz Schubert's biography offers little in the way of great adventures, love affairs, glamour and long journeys. Jörg Handstein – in what is now his tenth audio biography in the successful BR-KLASSIK series - devotes himself here to a composer with an altogether quieter life. Schubert's story still remains an exciting one: no famous composer before him had ever chosen to lead a life in which his musical activities were supported solely by a private circle of friends. This did not succeed without resistance, setbacks, great disappointments and personal tragedies. Schubert's unhappiness in love, his terrible illness, and probably also his early death were, ultimately, the price he paid for this unconventional life. He bravely stood his ground, however, countering an age of cultural and political paralysis with his great and bold art. In this audio biography, Schubert’s creative path can be followed in around 130 musical examples – something impossible in any biography in book form. Alongside Udo Wachtveitl (narrator) and Robert Stadlober (Schubert), many other voices bring the composer’s world and his circle of friends to life. Schubert’s conventional image is encumbered by two clichés. On the one hand, we have the warm-hearted, sentimental man, known to his friends familiarly as Schwammerl (“mushroom”), churning out endless songs and beautiful melodies, and on the other, the incessantly tortured outsider, with music primarily conveying a sense of “brokenness” and “alienation”. This audio biography allows Schubert to speak for himself as often as possible. Despite the sparse documentation, a far more nuanced picture emerges – and the well-known Austrian actor and rock musician Robert Stadlober finds richly contrasting colors for it. We discover a different Schubert here: single-minded, argumentative, philosophical, reflective, and with a wide range of interests. That is also what makes his life story so exciting.

Anton Bruckner's symphonies were a constant part of the repertoire for Mariss Jansons and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. The existing recordings - almost all the great Bruckner symphonies – are important documents of Jansons’ deep understanding of the works, and the high musical quality of the recordings also testifies to the long Bruckner tradition at the BRSO. Jansons followed Bruckner’s notes and markings with painstaking precision, and listening to a recording with the score reveals again and again how closely the conductor studied these works with the musicians of his orchestra. Bruckner's symphonies form the backbone of Late Romantic symphonic music. To a certain extent, Bruckner reinvented the symphony – something that not even Liszt or Wagner had dared to do in the wake of the groundbreaking masterpieces of Beethoven, which until then had been considered the culmination and conclusion of the genre. It was Bruckner and, somewhat later, Brahms who sought and found new methods of reviving the symphonic genre and developing it further. In this regard, Bruckner's approach was entirely new. From the outset, he relied on the sound of the large orchestra and, rather than mixing the individual groups of instruments, he tended to either separate them from each other or couple them together like organ registers (with which, as an organist, he was very familiar). Terraced dynamics, that is, the immediate juxtaposition of piano and forte without transition, was also something Bruckner derived from organ music. As a church musician, he had close contact with these and other elements of Baroque music, and they flowed into his symphonies. As far as dramaturgical development was concerned, he tended to favor Schubert; indeed, it was the organic continuation and alternating interconnection of themes Bruckner had learned from Schubert that also explains the unprecedented performance length of his symphonies.