Mahler: Orchesterlieder

Classical Music

Hartmut Haenchen was born in Dresden in 1943 and from the moment of his 1971 Carl Maria von Weber Competition victory onward, he has been a force of nature in the classical music world. These Mahler recordings are being released to commemorate Haenchen's seventieth birthday and a rich career conducting orchestras and opera companies worldwide.

Mahler composed some of the most powerful and emotive symphonic music of his age. As well as the big melodies, his symphonies are also full of beautiful moments of chamber music. This has inspired various arrangers to distill Mahler's monumental symphonic structures down to the more intimate proportions of a small chamber ensemble. The 2007 Klaus Simon arrangement is one of the most popular, and highlights the intimacy of Mahler's music while internalizing the power of the climaxes. This ensemble of talented students originally came together for an epic project with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Spread over a four-month period, the group performed side by side with the Orchestra on a three-city tour to India conducted by James Macmillan, with soloist Nicola Benedetti. In order to capture the particular frisson of this group before many graduated, Nimbus brought them together in June 2014 for this special recording project.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Lorin Maazel leads the Philharmonia Orchestra and a star-studded ensemble of performers in Mahler's first three symphonies. This is the first set in a series that will encompass Mahler's nine symphonies, featuring live orchestral recordings from London's Royal Festival Hall of Maazel and the Philharmonia's much-lauded Mahler cycle.

Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill brings her wide range of vocal colors and emotional expressivity to bear in her debut solo recital featuring the seldom paired songs of Gustav Mahler with five of wife Alma’s lesser-known, but equally engaging, songs. +Winner of the 2002 Kathleen Ferrier Award, Ms. Cargill has won many fans through her performances at The Metropolitan, New York, Covent Garden, London and Deutsche Opera, Berlin. +"a voice full of sunny delicacy and warmth." BBC Music Magazine

The recording of such a complex and ambitious work as Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony by the Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra (OFM in Spanish) is a demonstration of the determination and enthusiasm with which the group is facing his 30th anniversary. Highly artistic work, Mahler's Fifth Symphony is of great extension and expressive intensity; it is full of deep symbolism and evident spirituality. It is a musical and intellectual monument testing the quality of an orchestra and it's conductor. It is a challenge that, in a market full of references to the Austrian composer's masterpiece, the OFM faces with all the potential the work demands. In his first four symphonies, Gustav Mahler tried to identify with four ideas: the first, the power of will against destiny; the second, hope in the resurrection; in the third a certain "Nietzschean" pantheism, and the fourth is a musical manifesto about innocence. There is in all of them that kind of youthful lyricism which it's first songs have, a style that is nipped in the bud in his Fifth Symphony, completed in 1902 and premiered in Cologne by the G�rzenich Orchestra on 18 October 1904 under the direction of the author. The language he uses in his Fifth Symphony seems to be anticipating the future, in a kind of progressive tonality tending towards a certain harmonic instability and reinforcing the words of the composer himself who, sure of his technical mastery, goes so far as to say: "There will be no romantic or mystical elements in my work; it will simply be the expression of an unparalleled power of the activity of a man in the light of the sun, who has reached his vital climax".

The 6th symphony of Gustav Mahler was written between 1903 and 1904, mostly in Vienna, in a period of professional success and private happiness. But musically, the "Tragic", as the symphony is sometimes called seems like a bizarre reversal of Mahler's life reality. Or as an anticipation of future tragedies: the death of the daughter, the diagnosis of Mahler's heart disease and the profound occupational crisis at the Vienna Court Opera. They should soon end Mahler's short luck abruptly. In retrospect these three strokes of fate were identified with the famous hammer blows of the final movement. Alma Mahler wrote in her memoirs to the symphony: "No work has flowed from his heart so directly. The Sixth is his most personal work and a prophetic one on top of that." In mid-May 2019, Essen's General Music Director Tom� Netopil conducted the Essen Philharmonic Orchestra on two acclaimed performances of the Sixth Symphony. The work was performed almost exactly 113 years earlier, on May 27, 1906, by the same orchestra under the composer's direction.

This is a re-release of the SWRmusic bestseller 93.164, containing Mahler's Symphony No.4 - one of his most famous and beloved works, here conducted by Roger Norrington, famous for his "Stuttgart Sound." Though it was writing in 1899 and 1900, Mahler's Symphony No. 4 incorporates a song that was originally written in 1892, "Das himmlische Leben." The song presents a child's vision of heaven, and it is sung by a soprano in the work's fourth and final movement. Sir Roger Norrington was born in Oxford, and comes from a musical University family. He was a talented boy soprano, studying the violin from the age of ten and singing from the age of seventeen. He read English Literature at Cambridge University, and spent several years as an amateur violinist, tenor singer, and conductor, before attending the Royal College of Music as a postgraduate student of conducting, studying with Sir Adrian Boult. Norrington's work on scores, orchestral sound and size, seating and playing style has had a growing effect on the perception of 18th- and 19th- century orchestral music. He is in great demand as a guest conductor for symphony orchestras worldwide, working regularly with orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Salzburg, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

All Mahler scholars have agreed from the very start that Gustav Mahler embarked on an entirely new path with his Fifth Symphony. Even for his immediate contemporaries, such as the conductor Bruno Walter or the music critic Paul Bekker, the Fifth marked the beginning of a new creative phase, and Mahler himself was also keenly aware of this – which is why he was all the more upset by the fact that his work was not understood at its premiere in Cologne in October 1904 and, even later, met with a largely negative reception. In 1905, following an unsuccessful performance in Hamburg, the composer complained: "The Fifth is an accursed work. No-one understands it.” It was only after Mahler’s death in May 1911 that people slowly began to appreciate the piece. The Fifth ranks today as one of Mahler's most popular symphonies. This is due in part to Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice", which used the symphony’s world-famous Adagietto to great effect: the movement enjoyed unanimous approval from the very start, and has now advanced to become Mahler's “greatest hit” and the most famous work in his entire oeuvre. In its structure, the symphony does not follow the classic four-movement form, but presents us with five movements in three sections. Conceptually, Mahler relies on methods he had already tried and tested in the work’s great predecessors, the Second and Third Symphonies. The centerpiece of the work is a lengthy scherzo full of grotesque humour, inspired by Jean Paul, while its resting-point is the Adagietto, which certainly bears many of the hallmarks of Mahler's slow movements. The harsher sound of this symphony ushered in a new creative phase for Mahler – one that he developed further in the Sixth. The maximum use he makes of the tonal means available already clearly anticipates the Ninth, in which he begins to abandon tonality altogether and encompass the transcendental aspect of the music. This Munich concert event of March 2016, now released as a CD by BR KLASSIK, is an outstanding interpretation of one of the most important compositions of the international symphonic repertoire of the early 20th century. „Gustav Mahler himself feared that the „chaos!“ In his Fifth Symphony would deeply unsettle his audiences. The work has long since become popular, and the Adagietto has even become Mahler’s "greatest hit."

Thanks to his unusually strong affinity with Haydn and grasp of classical structures, Josef Krips proves a near-ideal conductor for the Fourth Symphony. Noting Mahler's repeated 'nicht eilen' ('don't rush') markings, Krips never hurries the music or indulges in unnecessary point-making, least of all in the radiant variations of the poco adagio third movement. The score unfolds with natural charm and warmth, lovingly communicated by the LSO's string section - led by Hugh Maguire, whose 'Death the Fiddler' is gauged at just the right level of grotesquery. With Suzanne Danco a pristine soloist in the finale, childlike but never childish, this is a beautifully-judged performance of a work which can too easily sound overstated, faux-naif or both.

Classical Music

Classical Music