Mahler Kinder

Throughout his lifetime, Gustav Mahler's musical imagination got sparked by the Wunderhorn anthology of folk poetry compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Whether autonomous lieder or conscripted into symphonic service, Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings represent some of his most exotic, exhilarating, but also visionary music. The Wunderhorn songs evoke and celebrate a lost era but they also prefigure its demise. Mahler captures this ambiguity in uncompromisingly melodious and idyllic, but also satiric, relentless and cruel music.

The Decca / Deutsche Grammophon catalogue of Mahler recordings is unsurpassable. Our major contribution to the celebrations this year will be the first-ever Mahler Complete Edition, a combined effort of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon recordings as an 18-CD supe-rbudget box, with the ten symphonies, Das Lied von der Erde, Das klagende Lied, the song cycles, the Knaben Wunderhorn songs and early works - in benchmark recordings by a great assembly of Mahler conductors, singers and orchestras. Each Symphony gets a different conductor, and the list is awesome: Abbado (no. 6), Bernstein (no. 5), Boulez (no. 4), Chailly (no. 10), Giulini (Das Lied), Haitink (no. 3), Karajan (no. 9), Kubelik (no. 1), Mehta (no. 2), Sinopoli (no. 7), Solti (no. 8).

Luciano Berio's most celebrated and influential work is his Sinfonia for 8 amplified voices and orchestra (1968), a tour de force of musical quotations and collages, literary references, and social commentary that he composed for The Swingle Singers and the New York Philharmonic on the occasion of the orchestra's 125th anniversary. This composition has received noteworthy performances by Berio, Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Riccardo Chailly, Hannu Lintu, and now Josep Pons, who leads the Synergy Vocals and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for this important release on Harmonia Mundi.

Soprano Barbara Hannigan has become something of a cult favorite with her deep dives into specific and unusual repertories. Her self-presentation in concert is unorthodox and marked by full-scale efforts to communicate the essence of the music at hand, in works ranging from Berio to Gershwin. So it is with this set of songs from the decade and a half on either side of 1900 in Vienna. The enjoyment begins with the physically passionate cover, an example of her way of personifying the music's spirit. Hannigan's is an utterly distinctive voice, edgy and coruscating, and she knows how to tone down her considerable virtuosic powers to the dimensions of the music, such as that here, intended for small rooms.