Mahler 4

Claudio Abbado is undeniably the supreme Mahler conductor of our time.
The Lucerne Festival Orchestra has set new standards in the field of classical music.
The core of the orchestra is provided by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, itself an élite body of players. Soloists like violinist Kolja Blacher, clarinettist Sabine Meyer, oboist Albrecht Mayer, violist Wolfram Christ, cellist Natalia Gutman, the Hagen Quartet and members of the Alban Berg Quartet to name just a few, make the Lucerne Festival Orchestra a star-studded ensemble.
Brand new recording – state-of-the-art quality.

Here we have not only the (now "Royal") Concertgebouw ensemble in all of its idiomatic glory, magnificently recorded, but also Chailly at his most interpretively perceptive–and the result is absolutely stunning… As a bonus, Mahler's Bach Suite also receives its finest performance on disc. - David Hurwitz; Classicstoday.com

After the highly acclaimed recordings of Mahler Symphonies no. 1, 2, 4 and 6 Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra now recorded the Fifth Sympony with its famous Adagietto in F major for strings and harp - one of the most intimate pieces that Mahler ever wrote for the orchestra.

After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world première of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects.

The release of Mahler´s Symphonies Nos. 1 + 2 starts the release the complete Mahler cycle with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra on DVD and Blu-ray. Each Symphony will have an introduction by Paavo Järvi.

In many ways Mahler’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are the most unusual works that the late Romantic composer ever wrote. The Seventh was the last in a series of middle-period pieces that were purely instrumental in character. Two movements headed “Nachtmusik“ (night music) and the remarkable writing for a guitar and a mandolin help to create a sequence of darkly Romantic visions. And even within Mahler’s markedly eclectic output, the Eighth Symphony enjoys the status of an exotic outsider thanks not only to its two-movement form combining an early medieval hymn and the final scene from Goethe’s Faust but also to the vast forces for which it is scored, earning it the title of “Symphony of a Thousand”.

Swedish Mezzo-soprano and former winner of BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, Katarina Karnéus is joined on this disc by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki to perform three of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral songs. As a composer, Gustav Mahler was absorbed by song and symphony as complementary genres deeply involved with each other. In his first symphony, Mahler included two themes from the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, originally scored for voice and piano, which he had recently composed to his own poems. It was perhaps the experience of orchestrating these themes in his symphony that a few years later inspired Mahler to create the version for voice and orchestra.