The series of the Mahler Symphonies with the Dusseldorf Symphonic under the baton of Adam Fischer has come to this end with the release of the Symphony No. 6.

Over the last four years Adam Fischer's Mahler recordings grew to a most successful recording project, winning the BBC Music Magazine Award, and the OPUS KLASSIK Trophy in Germany and many splendid and outstanding reviews from around the world.

In the Dusseldorf Tonhalle in late February and early March 2020, we gave Mahler's Sixth Symphony in three live concert performances which we recorded for this CD. This date in the calendar had special significance: the first lockdown period due to the Corona pandemic set in immediately thereafter.

The orchestra was playing in full line-up in front of a full house for the last time for a long while. The mood was ominous: we all felt something was amiss, and the next day everything had to be cancelled. We strongly associate those circumstances with our work on the Sixth, and with the foreboding we felt of a catastrophe that has since ruined the livelihoods of many musician colleagues and deprived us all of a meaningful period in our lives. Mahler's Sixth is always a major event for the orchestra and for the audience. One leaves the concert hall weary and exhausted; time is required to regain one's composure. This symphony requires a gigantic orchestra: here, once more, Mahler was attempting to stretch the boundaries of what was possible in his day.

Not to achieve a mere effect, but simply because he needed such a gigantic instrumental apparatus to express his feelings. The sheer amount of emotions we deal with in this symphony is almost unbearable. The controversial third hammer blow provides a good example: Mahler most certainly crossed it out after a rehearsal, overcome by emotion, afraid of dying. In his very bones he thought and felt that this symphony would prompt his demise.

The opulent soundworld of a Dutch late-Romantic master, still too little known outside his native country. Rarefied spirituality and refined sensuousness are the hallmarks of Hendrik Andriessen's (1892-1981) idiom, which offers an ethereal synthesis of Franckian chromaticism with an individual interpretation of classical forms and church modes. Though he trained as an organist, his writing for other solo instruments is fluent and idiomatic. The concertos for violin, cello and oboe share the silken textures of his better-known orchestral music, and this album won glowing reviews when first released in 2000. The album’s headline work is Miroir de peine, a languorous song-cycle to Henri Vangeon’s poems of religious ecstasy describing the suffering of Christ from the perspective of the Virgin Mary. It has attracted the advocacy of great sopranos from Elly Ameling to Christiane Stotijn. This 1991 recording by Roberta Alexander won an enthusiastic welcome from the critics for the poise and beauty of her performance and the richness of the engineering. Andriessen esteemed Franck as ‘a musical philosopher in the truest sense of the word,’ who drew ‘intense sentiments from the intuitive side of his genius into an orderly gestalt.’ Much the same could be said of Andriessen’s own idiom throughout his career, as this half-century retrospective over his career confirms, from the solemn lushness of Magna res est amor of 1919 to the Chromatic Variations and Cello Concertino of 1970. The Violin Concerto (1968-9) is still essentially couched in a Romantic vein, but shaded with more 20th-century accents of tonal anxiety, akin to Vaughan Williams and Casella in the 1930s. Any listener for whom conservatism is not a dirty word will relish becoming acquainted with Andriessen’s powerful expressive voice in these beautifully prepared and engineered performances.

In his song settings, Korngold pursued the Romantic ideal and lavished considerable care and inventiveness on their composition. His seemingly effortless gift for melody is everywhere ap-parent in this second volume (Vol.1 is on 8.572027), whether in the early works or the songs from the 1940s, which would not sound out of place in an operetta or a Broadway musical. Also present, notably in the Drei Gesänge, Op.18, is an exciting, experimental approach to harmony that reflects the music of his most radical opera, Das Wunderder Heliane (8.660410-12).

REVIEW:

Already in the 1920s, as a young man, Korngold was composing in a powerfully vocal idiom, as can be heard in the four Lieder des Abschieds (Songs of Farewell). He did not become a prolific art song composer, but there are lieder dotted among his long list of compositions This second volume of his complete songs include Sonett fur Wien from 1953, just four years before his death. The mezzo, Sibylle Fischer, has the task of expressing so much sadness in the four Lieder des Abschieds, a mood she passes to the baritone, Uwe Schenker-Primus, in the Drei Gesange. He also has the task to hark on sorrow in the Lieder aus dem Nachlass, and we hear him to better effect in the forthright Five Songs. That Korngold wrote songs for the cinema surfaces with Morgen from the film The Constant Nymph, here recreated with a piano trio accompaniment, and sung with a smooth elegance by Britta Stallmeister. Together with the pianist, Klaus Simon, the vocal trio give us a rare chance to hear forgotten Korngold.

– David's Review Corner (SDavid Dento)

The series of the complete Mahler Symphonies with the Düsseldorf Symphonic under the baton of Ádám Fischer continues here with the release of the Symphony No. 9. Over the last two years Ádám Fischer’s Mahler recordings grew to a most successful recording project, winning the BBC Music Magazine Award, and the OPUS KLASSIK Trophy in Germany. Adam Fischer: "Mahler wrote his Ninth symphony in 1909, and it is about death. To be more precise it is about dying. And I know of no other language apart from German in which the words 'death' (Tod) and 'dying' have entirely different etymologies."

From the symphony, the largest form for the largest orchestra, to the song, the smallest form for the smallest ensemble, would seem to be an enormous step. Mahler nonetheless brought them together and interwove them in Das Lied von der Erde. Iván Fischer leads the Budapest Festival Orchestra and soloists Gerhild Romberger and Robert Dean Smith in this unity of symphony and song.

Principal trombonist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jörgen van Rijen is also much in demand as a soloist with a special commitment to promoting his instrument. Various composers have written new pieces for him, including James MacMillan and Theo Verbey, whose works are included on the present release together with Luciano Berio’s SOLO for trombone and orchestra. The present recordings were made at concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, Markus Stenz and Ed Spanjaard respectively. They have previously been showcased on three different discs on the RCO’s own Live Horizon label, and are gathered together here for the first time. The album therefore highlights the versatility of van Rijen as a musician, but also of his instrument as perceived and presented by three very different composers.

After winning the BBC Musica Award as the Best Orchestral Music album in 2018, Adam Fischer continues his Mahler's survey with the great cycle Das Lied von der Erde. He is supported by two great singers as Anna Larsson and stuart Skelton. The conductor writes: ‘From the onset, the music in Das Lied von der Erde is permeated by a special mood. Even the texts, based on Far Eastern poetry, are more mood than content. Mahler repeatedly abandons the words’ meaning, but the mood remains. The music implies so much more than the words! For instance, the third poem evokes the reflection of a mirror image in water, but I don’t see those images anywhere in the music. Mahler is not concerned with helping us understand every syllable. If the voice, in its anguish, is drowned out by the orchestra, that is what the music is trying to achieve…”

Conductor Adam Fischer reflects on Mahler’s Third Symphony: “Mahler’s entire output seems like one long farewell to me: it is as if he was bidding farewell to the past and likewise to the future, since he had a great fear of death. At the end of his symphonies we often encounter utopias, as here in the Adagio of the Third, and many years later, particularly, in the Ninth. Something new sets in, but the movement is still a closure. From it we learn that whatever is new will no longer occur in this world. The Third Symphony, on the whole, is one of Mahler’s richest: the individual movements are so different from one another that they almost seem to stem from different periods of Mahler’s life. The Third contains its own world in itself- already in the first movement, longer than most Beethoven symphonies. Then Mahler plunges into the Wunderhorn world: the world of simplicity where his style seems inspired by Schubert. He quotes from his own works and creates his own mythology. Just as in a grand novel, the same figures appear in different stories. The second and third movements belong together; then, a new dimension is introduced in the fourth one with the human voice. With the contralto’s first note, Mahler truly opens up a new world. This is a new kind of composition altogether. The measures almost seem to flow into one another; Mahler is freeing himself from the rigors of rhythmic bars… This abandonment of the rigorous diktat of meter represents a challenge for every conductor.”

These three facets in the prism of Mozart’s operatic genius shine in Glyndebourne’s typically thought-provoking productions, featuring skilled singer–actors buoyed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s luminous period sound. Nicholas Hytner’s beautiful, ‘shockingly traditional’ production of Così fan tutte frames artful performances teased by Ivan Fischer from an outstanding international cast of convincing young lovers. Michael Grandage’s staging of Le nozze di Figaro is Glyndebourne’s seventh in a line stretching back to the company’s 1934 début production. Marshalled by the ‘ideal pacing’ of Robin Ticciati, a youthful cast of principals has ‘no weak link’ and ‘looks gorgeous’ (The Sunday Times). David McVicar’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail offers a ‘mesmerising, sensitive ... outstanding’ portrayal of Enlightenment-era fascination with the East that is both ‘exquisitely acted and sung’ (The Guardian), and Ticciati leads the OAE through a restored, authentic rendition of the critical score with ‘lovely fizz’ and ‘poignant gravitas’. (The Independent). "Glorious orchestral playing and magnificent singing under Iván Fischer" ( Cosi fan tutte - BBC Music Magazine) "Finely conducted by Robin Ticciati, McVicar’s production of Mozart’s Turkish comedy is a vocal and visual treat." (Die Entführung - The Stage) "... this is a Figaro of rare grace, naturalness and charm." (Le Nozze di Figaro - The Daily Telegraph)

This new release features Saint-Saëns' Second Piano Concerto with Nelson Freire under the baton of AdAm Fischer. Not many pianists are able to accomplish the stylistic and technical challenges of this concerto, demanding complete precision in fingering and leaps, as well as perfect command of the "jeu perlé": Nelson Freire masters this work with great aplomb, quiet assurance and, at times, a twinkle in his eye. He is completely committed and happy to take risks, triggering veritable "Sturm und Drang", and always congenially accompanied by AdAm Fischer. Twenty years previously, the Brazilian pianist (then aged 22) had made his German radio debut with a recital programme which he recorded at the RIAS's Lankwitz studio in Berlin. In Grieg's Lyric Pieces and the Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos 5 and 10 by Liszt, as well as his Polonaise in E major, Freire not only demonstrated his stupendous manual prowess, but also what was already at that stage his extraordinary touch and stylistic confidence. These early solo recordings anticipate his brilliant later style, completing the picture of the exceptional pianist. All recordings on this album are released for the first time.

Annie Fischer enjoys a singular reputation within the great tradition of Hungarian pianists due to her deeply moving and romantically intimate performances. She became famous and admired on account of her uncompromising spiritually absorbing interpretations. Like many other musicians, Fischer only left behind a few studio recordings however the few that were left became benchmark interpretations.