Mahler: Ich atmet' einen linden Duft (Rückert-Lieder) - SACD

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony bring their historic Mahler recording cycle to a close with the composer’s three song cycles. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, who launched their historic Mahler recording cycle in 2001, complete the best-selling, critically acclaimed and award winning project with the composer’s atmospheric song cycles. The live recordings, taken from concerts in the orchestra’s Davies Symphony Hall, features two of America’s most lauded singers, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in Rückert-Lieder, and baritone Thomas Hampson in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and selections from Das Knaben Wunderhorn.

The release coincides with international celebrations Mahler’s music, as 2010 is the 150th anniversary of his birth, and 2011 marks the 100th year of his death. The SFS and MTT, among the world’s leading interpreters of Mahler’s music, will play a significant role in the global commemoration of Mahler, through concerts, prominent media projects, and extensive international tours. The MTT/SFS Mahler cycle has won seven Grammy Awards, including three for Best Classical Album, and has sold over 140,000 recordings world-wide. This final instalment puts the crowning touch on every collector’s CD shelf.

Swedish Mezzo-soprano and former winner of BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, Katarina Karnéus is joined on this disc by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki to perform three of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral songs.

As a composer, Gustav Mahler was absorbed by song and symphony as complementary genres deeply involved with each other. In his first symphony, Mahler included two themes from the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, originally scored for voice and piano, which he had recently composed to his own poems. It was perhaps the experience of orchestrating these themes in his symphony that a few years later inspired Mahler to create the version for voice and orchestra.

All of the songs in Kindertotenlieder and Rückert-Lieder are settings of poems by the poet Friedrich Rückert, composed between 1901 and 1904. For Kindertotenlieder (Songs of the death of children) Mahler chose five of more than four hundred poems written by Rückert in reaction to the death of his two children: poems of despair, disbelief and resignation.

While Kindertotenlieder was conceived as a cycle, the Rückert-Lieder are more loosely connected with each other and they include some of the most sublime Mahlerian moments, for instance in Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

The legendary Michael Tilson Thomas-San Francisco Symphony Mahler cycle is presented together for the first time in a 17-Hybrid SACD box set, with a neverbefore-released bonus of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham singing Rückert Lieder accompanied by MTT at the piano.

The foremost Mahler cycle of our time, by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, is brought together for the first time in a single package: a magnificent collection of 17 Hybrid SACDs enclosed in elegant gatefold digi-packs and housed in a stylish and compact box set. In addition to all of Mahler’s Symphonies and the Songs with Orchestra, the set includes the first ever release of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham singing Rückert Lieder accompanied by Michael Tilson Thomas at the piano. The release coincides with the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death on 18 May, as well as the Symphony’s European tour to such cultural capitals as Barcelona, Brussels, Luxembourg, Madrid, Paris, Prague and Vienna.

The MTT-SFS Mahler series has sold over 130,000 units worldwide, earned international critical acclaim, and received seven Grammy’s and a Gramophone Award. This new presentation is an efficient and affordable way to acquire Mahler’s entire orchestral output by the composer’s most notable modern-day interpreters.