Taken from the 2012 Japan tour that performed the complete Beethoven cycle in various cities across Japan garnering much acclaim for the Chor and Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and now available in single editions, this live recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 from Tokyo's Suntory Hall also includes noted vocal soloists, Christiane Karg, Mihoko Fujimura, Michael Schade and Michael Volle, all frequent collaborators with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.

For the last seventeen years of his life – from 2003 to 2019 – Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. Both ensembles and their conductor appreciated each other deeply on an artistic as well as a human level, and this resulted in numerous unforgettable concerts. Jansons’ unrelenting demands on himself and his musicians, his always respectful treatment of his colleagues, and his great devotion to music all played a lead role in their work together. Mariss Jansons occupies a place of honor in the orchestra’s history, and its players will always revere and cherish his memory. With the death of Mariss Jansons one year ago, the music world lost one of its greatest artistic personalities.

Born the son of conductor Arvids Jansons in Riga in 1943, the young Mariss studied at the Leningrad Conservatory before completing his studies with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg. In 1971 he was a prizewinner at the Karajan Conducting Competition and began his close collaboration with today's St. Petersburg Philharmonic. From 1979 to 2000, Jansons was Music Director of the Oslo Philharmonic; from 1997 to 2004 he conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; and in the 2003/04 season he became Chief Conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. The 2004/05 season marked the start of his tenure at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which ended in 2015. As a guest conductor, he worked with all the leading orchestras of Europe and the USA, and his discography includes many award-winning recordings.

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were linked by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and as yet unreleased live recordings of concerts from the past years. This recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony documents concerts from February 2011 in Munich.

As an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, and especially that of the German-Austrian late Romantic period, Haitink was held in high esteem worldwide. With him, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler were always in the best of hands. His driving principle was to take the sound architecture of a musical composition with its many-layered interweavings and render it transparently audible; extreme sensitivity of sound was paired with a clearly structured interpretation of the score.

A valid recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony places the highest demands on the skills of the conductor as well as on the virtuosity of each individual orchestral musician. Only under such circumstances can the highly complex individual voices merge to form a magnificent whole – an undertaking that achieves breathtaking effects time and again. A conductor is required here who unites the ensemble of individual, soloist-level musicians with an overarching musical concept. With its two grotesque "night musics", its sounds of nature, naïve folk motifs and intoxicating orchestral tutti, the Seventh Symphony is highly typical of Mahler's unique sound world.

Together with narrator Rufus Beck, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin presents "The Five Thieves and the Secret in the Sack". Inspired by the Thousand and One Nights, it is a magical story about the power of friendship. Author Katharina Neuschaefer and illustrator Martin Fengel captivate their young audience with this exotic tale, set amid the vastness of the desert – and musically illustrated by the colorful sounds of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade".

What made Mariss Jansons different from many of his colleagues? What was the key to his success? And most importantly, after all his artistic experiences, what brought about his maturity and artistic completion In addition to his own willpower and his work ethic, his extraordinary musical life was determined by many factors; they included an open-minded and supportive environment, and an orchestra of outstanding musicians. One important aspect was certainly the fact that Jansons despised any kind of routine. Even when rehearsing Beethoven's Eroica for the umpteenth time, he was always inspired anew by the work - discovering the as yet undiscovered. Routine would have prevented any change in his perspective, and hampered his enthusiasm. Moreover there was Jansons' meticulous and analytical approach to his work, which started long before he mounted the podium. He began by reading biographical information on the composer, scholarly information on the work, texts about its era and its milieu - everything he could lay his hands on. During rehearsals, he then passed on his profound knowledge and his resulting interpretive approach to the musicians. Jansons considered it his task, as early as the first rehearsal, to bring all the musicians up to the same level of knowledge. He wanted them to understand his thought processes, to recognise the explained concept behind the work and, ideally, to be able to feel the same way during their performance as he did on the podium. In the concerts, this synchronous implementation by one hundred musicians of the musical content of a work and of the concept inherent in it duly brought about that incredible pull that almost all of Janson's interpretations exert(ed) on his listeners. In addition to this collective aspect of everyone pulling together, Jansons also worked on the sound that is genuine for each composer. In this regard, for instance, he condemned accusations of kitsch where Tchaikovsky's music was concerned. He was aware of the danger of music being played too sweetly. For him, it was simply Tchaikovsky played wrongly, and was like pouring "sugar into honey". It meant a lot to Jansons to bring out the emotions in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, of course - the emotional drama, the tragedy, the depression - but he would never force, exaggerate or emphasise them merely for the sake of effect. When the Sixth is performed as sensitively as it is by Jansons, Tchaikovsky's music acquires its true depth of meaning. "A conductor," said Mariss Jansons, "is like a director on the podium" – he analyses, stages and interprets the work. This principle, resulting from his opera conducting, was one that he transferred to the many levels of meaning in symphonic music, and here he developed a kind of directorial concept with precise approaches to interpretation. Works such as Stravinsky's Petrushka or Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique were primarily suited to this, because as programme music they sparked the visual imagination and demanded a certain musical "realism". He wanted the fairground music in Petrushka to sound shrill and out of tune, and asked the musicians to have the courage to articulate their part in just the same manner, rather than trimming it to the expectations of high culture. The contrabassoon was to play roughly, even vulgarly. Jansons was against any attempt to make the music sound pleasant here – he wanted the orchestral barrel-organ to sound out of tune, and the symphonically portrayed drunken passer-by to sound very drunk indeed. Similarly, in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, the March to the Scaffold passes us by as a musically realistic nightmare, gripping right to the end – when the head of the executed man, severed by the guillotine, falls very audibly to the ground. Jansons also worked especially intensively on modifying the sound of the strings, above all when a phrase had to assume a subtle and psychologically important function. He differentiated playing styles very precisely in individual passages - rough, melancholy, brisk, cynical, gloating, whispering, giggling or radiant – and here he particularly influenced the bow stroke, the pressure on the string and the stroke length.

The visiting Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra opened its concert at the 1967 Vienna Festival with a high-octane performance of Dvorák’s patriotic overture The Hussites. In the Brahms Violin Concerto, the elegant soloist Henry Szeryng and the conductor Rafael Kubelík entered into a musical dialogue that was both subtly sensitive and quick-witted. This release has been digitally mastered from the original tapes for optimal sound quality, and is sure to delight a whole new generation of listeners.

REVIEWS:

Some recordings need merely seconds to make their mark, especially when taken from memorable concerts. One such occurred on June 11, 1967, when the Bavarian RSO under Rafael Kubelík were joined by Henryk Szeryng at the Vienna Konzerthaus for a performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, music-making that exhibited a degree of elasticity and intellectual elevation that is typical of both artists (it’s newly reissued but was originally released by Orfeo in 2017).

Try the first movement’s big central tutti at 8’38”, Kubelík’s natural brand of rubato and the strings’ soaring tone, winding down to Szeryng’s meditative re-entry soon afterwards. And there’s the superb oboe solo at the start of the Adagio, the perfect preparation for Szeryng’s angelic solo. Rarely have I heard a reading that captures the music’s rhapsodic spirit as tellingly as Szeryng and Kubelík do here, tracing the line’s ever-shifting expressive focus with an uncanny musical instinct. And the bustle of the finale, crisp and upbeat, its gypsy inflections unmistakable from the off, its lyrical central section returning us to the songlike aspects of the first two movements.

But it’s the disc’s opening track that in many respects proves a prize among prizes, Dvořák’s Hussite Overture, music originally intended as part of a dramatic trilogy on the Bohemian religious leader Jan Hus. The principal theme is more famous for its use in Smetana’s Má vlast but Dvořák knits it into a 13-minute panoply of dramatic events that Kubelík and his players respond to as if their lives depended on it. There have been fine commercial recordings but none that fans the flames quite as effectively as this one. The stereo recording wears its years lightly. Unmissable!

-- Gramophone

After an excellent Hussite Overture from Kubelik and the orchestra, the conductor shapes Brahm’s tutti well, working up quite a storm and not relaxing too much for the lyrical theme. Szeryng’s entry is imperious; he produces lovely lyrical playing for the quieter passages.

-- The Strad

The stereo sound is quite good, and not just for the time—it is vivid and full, making for an enjoyable listen. I feel a touch of regret at having missed out on Szeryng this long, but in the spirit of better late than never, this is a memorable recording that deserves high praise.

-- Fanfare

You don't have to like every composer - but there's no getting around J. S. Bach. The successful series of BR-KLASSIK audio biographies is now devoted to this central star of the musical firmament. His sparsely documented life leaves plenty of room for the imagination in works of fiction, but the authentic sources – well narrated – are just as captivating in every way. "If ever a tone artist brought the hidden secrets of harmony into the most artistic execution, it was undoubtedly our Bach.” (from the Necrology published by C.P.E. Bach in 1754). Son of a town piper, organist, concertmaster, Kapellmeister, then Thomaskantor in Leipzig for 27 years. Married twice, 20 children. Active in Thuringia and Saxony. When compared with the spectacular biography of Handel (BR-KLASSIK 900911), this one seems rather short on excitement – yet Bach's biography also provides a fascinating insight into an age that is very distant and foreign to us today. An age of proud, aspiring cities, magnificent courts, simple-minded town councillors, music-loving but unpredictable princes, church music that was already somewhat antiquated, and fashionable instrumental music from France and Italy. Bach moves confidently in the field of tension created by these opposing worlds – while creating music that surpasses that of all his contemporaries in terms of its artistry, depth and expressiveness. In Leipzig, Bach intends to raise church music to a completely new level and place it on a par with theology; he wants it to be multi-layered and speak directly to the faithful. Only a few years later, however, this initial enthusiasm wanes. Headstrong and uncompromising by nature, he now becomes restless and dissatisfied due to his frustrating battles with the petty town authorities. He composes a lot of secular music once again, seeks contact with the Dresden court, and finally retreats into his very own world to fathom the final "secrets of harmony". For all its modesty, therefore, the story of Bach's life is nevertheless magnificent, moving, and sometimes even shocking. This audio biography gets as close to the protagonist as the sources allow, also bringing his environment to life – the princes, churchmen and town councillors, and his friends and adversaries. In addition, we are introduced to the frequently bizarre everyday world of the 18th century: not always edifying church services, terrible transportation, lavish dining and drinking, or the horrors of an eye operation. At the centre of it all, however, is the music. "He should not be called brook (in German: Bach) but sea," Beethoven once apparently said, "because of his infinite inexhaustible wealth of tone combinations and harmonies." The numerous musical examples in this audio biography are densely interwoven with the narrative, and literally immerse the listener in this boundless abundance. Famed as an actor in the popular German detective series “Tatort”, Udo Wachtveitl is also a music lover and long-time narrator of the BR audio biographies. He regards the "structure behind music" as highly important, so Bach's life and work are a special source of inspiration to him. The Jena-born and currently highly regarded actor Albrecht Schuch ("All Quiet on the Western Front” plays the role of Johann Sebastian Bach, and several other outstanding BR narrators also shine in a wide variety of roles – making this audio biography a real treat!

What does the work of a conductor actually involve? They move their hands, arms, and whole body; they make use of their eyes and facial expressions - and they also sing and speak (only during rehearsals, of course). Being able to follow a conductor's interpretation makes for an exciting process, and conveys the basic idea behind a work far more vividly at the same time.

"Conductors in Rehearsal" is a BR-KLASSIK series that takes a closer look at the “orchestral workshop”. One can experience first-hand how the conductor's wishes and instructions are implemented, how their explanations and temperament change the resulting sound, and what concepts lie behind the interpretation of the work. Thanks to this series - which also now being released on album - the special collaboration between Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra can be documented. The second box set presented by BR-KLASSIK documents four rehearsals for concerts in the Munich Philharmonie im Gasteig and the Herkulessaal der Residenz in Munich, taken from different phases of the collaboration between Mariss Jansons’ work with the BRSO.