With Gustav Mahler, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has a very special relationship. The composer conducted the orchestra no less than 12 times and found in Amsterdam an understanding audience. Mahler's Fourth Symphony was premiered in Amsterdam by the composer, who conducted it twice, once before and once after the interval, so that the audience could get to know the work better. With this release, Mariss Jansons and the Concertgebouw orchestra add an impressive new chapter to the RCO's recorded history of Mahler Symphonies.
The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoyed a long and intensive artistic collaboration, which came to an abrupt end with Haitink's death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and previously unreleased live recordings of their concerts from past years. This recording of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony documents a concert given in February 2015 in Munich's Philharmonie i'm Gasteig. This recording of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony documents concerts from November 2005 at Munich's Philharmonie i'm Gasteig. Haitink first conducted a Munich subscription concert in 1958, and from then on was a regular guest with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra - either in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz or in the Philharmonie i'm Gasteig. This congenial collaboration lasted for more than six decades. The orchestra musicians and singers enjoyed working with him just as much as the BR sound engineers. As an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, and especially that of the German-Austrian Late Romantic period, Haitink was held in high esteem throughout the world. With him, the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich were always in the best of hands. Haitink's driving principle was to make the sound architecture of a musical composition, with it's complex interweaving, transparently audible; extreme sensitivity of sound was combined with a clearly structured interpretation of the score. In his Fourth Symphony, Gustav Mahler brought his preoccupation with the poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn to a preliminary climax. Texts from the collection, published between 1805 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, had already been incorporated into the "Wunderhorn Symphonies" Nos. 2 and 3. In Mahler's Fourth Symphony, composed between 1899 and 1901, the final movement features the Wunderhorn poem "Das himmlische Leben" (The Heavenly Life), which the composer had already set to music in 1892. It depicts a paradise beyond the grave, seen from a child's perspective. Mahler's sceptical view of the world of his time forms a utopian counter-concept to this "heavenly world."
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 - Wagner: Prelude from Parsifal - Men
ICA Classics
CD
$14.99Nov 19, 2013
The highly distinguished conductor Rudolf Kempe (1910-1976) started as an oboist with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. During the Second World War, he was chief conductor of the Chemnitz Opera until 1946. He then worked at Weimar for the 1948-9 season, before joining the Dresden Opera and becoming chief conductor. From 1952 to 1954, he was chief conductor of the Bavarian State Opera, which he conducted at Covent Garden in 1953 to great acclaim. Mahler's Symphony No.4 is a new addition to the Kempe discography. The recording, which was discovered in the Music Preserved archive in York, is a real rarity. Similarly, Mendelssohn's Ruy Blas Overture is a new addition to the conductor's discography. It is heard here in a fiery performance captured live from the Royal Festival Hall in 1967 with the LSO. Kempe's account of the Prelude to Act I of Wagner's Parsifal, recorded in 1965, confirms his status as one of the greatest Wagnerian conductors of the 20th century. His Covent Garden performances of Parsifal in 1959 were landmarks for the company.
Schmidt: Symphony No. 4; Intermezzo from "Notre Dame" / Blunier, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn
MDG
SACD
$24.99Jun 01, 2010
Widely acknowledged to be Franz Schmidt's finest symphony, the main offering of this 2010 MDG Live disc is in some ways the composer's most challenging work. Schmidt composed the Symphony No. 4 in C major as a requiem for his daughter Emma, who had died in childbirth in 1932. Schmidt's grief is plainly evident in the brooding music, which works its way through many unexpected chromatic turns and dark modulations, and develops a plaintive trumpet theme, heard at the beginning and in various guises throughout the work. In terms of the structure, Schmidt combined sonata allegro and variation forms to elaborate the trumpet theme as a primary subject, and the four movements are to be played as one continuous movement. Schmidt is often regarded as a conservative composer, but his dissonant harmonies here are quite adventurous for his style, and the uncertain mood of the music is ambiguous enough to remind one of late Mahler. The filler work, the Intermezzo from Schmidt's opera Notre Dame, is a sweetly lyrical work that is cast in a more conventionally Romantic vein than the symphony, though it's uplifting mood is a suitable contrast to the bleakness of the preceding work. Stefan Blunier and the Beethoven Orchester Bonn play both works with passionate commitment and deep emotion, and the high standards of performance and reproduction that are typical of MDG's hybrid SACDs are met in this excellent recording.
