Mariss Jansons

To celebrate the 100th birthday of the great Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich, Mariss Jansons assembled eight of the world's finest orchestras to determine which is the best of his 15 symphonies. There is no doubt that Jansons is the man for the job. Trained under Mravinsky and long steeped in Shostakovich's music, Jansons brings a lifetimes' love and intimacy to his interpretations - not to mention a terrific baton technique and an unfailing sense of tempo.

From 2003 to 2019, Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. His death on December 1, 2019 marked the end of an era. As a conductor, Mariss Jansons was appreciated by the musicians of his orchestra and chorus like no other, he was loved by his Munich audience, and revered by his fans in international concert halls from Tokyo to New York. To create a place for everyone who wants to remember individual concerts or tours during his time as the principal conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, there is now a timeline on the orchestra’s website. All the concerts since his inaugural one in Munich on October 23, 2003 can be found there. In addition to documentation of programmes and line-ups, selected concerts are accompanied by image galleries, concert videos, backstage material and excerpts from interviews or rehearsals from the archives of BR-KLASSIK and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. These archives are continually being extended, so the timeline is worth visiting again and again. We hope that this “virtual collection of memories” will give Jansons fans all over the world pleasure in browsing and remembering.

The performance by Mariss Jansons and the London Philharmonic is excellent. Jansons fully exploits some striking moments in the 15th, and generally takes a balanced approach, at different times selecting tempi that are slower or faster than the norm, with high quality orchestral playing. In Jansons’ 15th, his Adagio is particularly successful. Jansons effectively builds to a powerful climax at the end of the long finale.

Antonín Dvorák's Stabat Mater, Op. 58, written in the aftermath of the deaths of three of his children, is a sober and powerful work, inexplicably neglected and unlike any other work of choral music from the 19th century. Perhaps most performances don't capture its full weight, but this live recording from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons, does so. There are many deep pleasures here. The orchestra's choir is extraordinary: rich yet without a hint of wobble and utterly clear in its sense of the text. Jansons keeps things at a deliberate pace that lets the music breathe and the currents of personal experience rise to the surface. The soloists, none terribly well known, are fine in their individual numbers, but absolutely transcendent in ensembles, nowhere more so that in the sublime "Quando corpus morietur" finale (track 10); there are a couple of other strong recordings of this work, but it seems likely that no one has ever matched this conclusion. The live recording from the Herkulessaal in Munich is impressively transparent and faithful to the spontaneity of the event. A superb Dvorák release.

… you get here is perhaps the best of all worlds: a major symphonic work idiomatically played by a first-rate virtuoso orchestra under the hands of a conductor whose contact with the work looks back to the symphony's very creation, captured in vivid, realistic sound none of the russian maestros mentioned above could ever aspire to.

Mariss Jansons considers Dmitri Shostakovich to be one of the most serious and sincere composers ever, and finds the fifteen symphonies in particular to be deeply moving and captivating. He sees their music as bearing shattering testimony to a traumatic era of political darkness, while remaining a timeless expression of existential human feeling and experience. Over a period of seventeen years, Mariss Jansons has recorded all the Shostakovich symphonies, on each occasion together with the orchestra he was artistically associated with at the time. Six of the performances were with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.