Michael Gielen

Despite all the differences in the musical language of the works by the Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki included on this recording, they are united by their quality as a lament: Szymanowski's Stabat mater, completed in 1926 and based on a Polish translation rather than the original Latin text of the medieval poem, is still considered one of the most important contributions to 20th-century music.

The Bruckner recordings on this second volume of the Michael Gielen EDITION were made principally with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg. This enables the listener to follow the orchestra's development over the years, culminating in their outstanding 2013 performance of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.

This fifth installment of the Michel Gielen Edition contains works by Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky. Gielen greatly admired these composers, whose works he frequently performed. We thus continue the editorial play for the Michael Gielen Edition. Volume 5 includes many first releases or recordings of Gielen from the 1960s and 1970s. Gielen is celebrating his 90th birthday in July, 2017. The album also contains a spoken section from Michael Gielen's last concert with his SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg in 2014.

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.

In October 2014, Michael Gielen issued a press release announcing that he had been forced to end his conducting activities for health reasons. On this occasion, and also with his 90th birthday in July 2017 in mind, it is time to listen to the different phases of a long conducting career. The Michael Gielen Edition offers this opportunity. It comprises several volumes of varying size, dedicated to individual composers or major historical periods. The recordings in this sixth volume have all been taken from the SWR’s Baden-Baden archive. Hence they are all performed by “his” orchestra, recently named the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg. Presumably the earliest recording of a Mahler symphony conducted by Gielen was at a concert of the Hessischer Rundfunk (public broadcaster for the German state of Hessen), where the Fifth Symphony was played in December 1963, and his last recording of a Mahler symphony was the Sixth Symphony performed in a guest concert of the SWR Symphony Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival on August 21, 2013.