Michael Sanderling

Beethoven’s final symphony was also the first in the history of music to go beyond the scope of purely instrumental music and open itself up to the human voice. Conceived in several stages between 1817 and 1824, his D minor Symphony op.125 enlists the services of a choir and four vocal soloists in its final movement, effectively becoming a cantata. With its setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy from 1785, it conjures up a dream of humans coexisting in peace – assuming that foes can become brothers. Beethoven’s own contemporaries believed that his Ninth Symphony represented the ne plus ultra of symphonic music and that the genre’s traditional parameters had been definitively exhausted with this work, whereas in fact the Ninth marks the beginning of a new symphonic age, providing the impetus for a whole series of unorthodox successors from Berlioz and Liszt to Mahler and Shostakovich.

Mozart’s magnificent setting of the Requiem Mass needs no introduction. One of his last works and a landmark of choral music, it is paired on this album with a new and complementary work by the pianist and composer Fazıl Say: Mozart ve Mevlana.