Gielen Mahler

Gustav Mahler - Symphonie Nr.6 (SWR-Sinfonieorchester, Baden-Baden - Kirill Kondrashin) - 2011
Classical | EAC | FLAC, IMG+CUE, LOG | Covers | 1CD, 354 MB
Label: Hanssler | Catalog Number: CD 94.217 | TT: 68'22''

I'm a bit taken aback that Haenssler should label excellent stereo from 1981 as a historical recording. Kondrashin died that year at the age of 67 - the day after his birthday, as it happens. His Mahler recordings took place with his own Moscow Phil., but the present orchestra of Southwest Radio in Baden-Baden and Freiburg was under Michael Gielen, an experienced and exciting Mahler conductor in his own right, so the chemistry must have been good - better, I suspect, than with any Soviet orchestra at the time. Mahler wasn't a regular part of the orchestral tradition there.

This release is the first of a ten-volume set of works conducted by legendary Michael Gielen. When it was announced on October 30, 2014 that Michael Gielen would no longer pursue conducting engagements because of health issues, it was decided that to honor this musician a detailed survey of his 50-year career would be made. Hence, the Michael Gielen EDITION was born. Volume 1, presented here, is a 6-disc set that presents works from Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, recorded between 1967 and 2010.

No other symphony by Gustav Mahler has been subject to such a wide palette of readings and interpretations as the Seventh Symphony, from a scholarly and theoretical standpoint as well as by musicians, conductors and orchestras. It has been described as a «manifestation of elated sensual pleasure, a great Gloria» (in the foreword to the Philharmonia pocket score) and as having a «wholeness and formal coherence» with «mostly folkloric, thus memorable, themes» (critic Ernst Rychnovsky after the premiere in Prague in 1908). It has been accused of «disjointedness» (musicologist Attila Csampai), and of being a «very problematic work» (Mahler pioneer and conductor Otto Klemperer).

These are important first recordings of orchestral works, commissioned by South-West German Radio, that have turned out to be milestones in Wolfgang Rihm’s development. He was just 22 when Morphonie was heard at Donaueschingen in 1974, a premiere that must have seemed like a slap in the face to those hardline serialists who gathered there every year, for it showed Rihm using a complex musical language to convey an unmistakably powerful emotional message.

Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older "phantasmogorist" Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.