Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D minor

After four years in the making, David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich completed their highly acclaimed cycle of Gustav Mahler’s complete symphonies last year. The cycle was recorded as Super Audio CDs. Now the complete cycle will be released as a Limited Edition set on 15 SACDs. An additional DVD showcases Viviane Blumenschein’s film documenting David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich recording Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.

‘The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ This oft-quoted statement by Mahler serves to illustrate his extraordinary artistic ambition and focus.

The journey through his symphonies is rich and emotionally charged, imbued as they are with the influences of his surroundings, his suffering as well as his joy, and his unique sense of satire.

These critically acclaimed recordings culminate in the Tenth Symphony completed by Joe Wheeler (“Heartily recommended” – CDnow) and the box-set includes detailed notes and sung texts.

Klaus Tennstedt was born on 6th June 1926 in Merseburg a small Saxon town between Leipzig and Halle. He was a highly talented violinist and followed his father into the Halle Opera orchestra of which he was made leader whilst still in his teens. He also studied in Dresden and as a member of the fire brigade was detailed to dig bodies out of the rubble after the city was blitzed in 1944. A solo career awaited him but a growth on his left hand brutally cut this short at the age of 19 but, after months of depression, he emerged as the opera’s repetiteur. He naturally watched conductors but was not given an opportunity to try until, at an hour’s notice, he took over a performance.

The experience galvanised him to seek this path as a career but his refusal to join the Communist Party ensured that he was limited to poorer opera houses. In his mid-30’s he went to Berlin seeking a chance to defect, but it was not until March 1971, aged 44, when he was allowed to conduct in Gothenburg. The freedom in the West did not give him many major opportunities either; however the offer of the musical directorship of the Kiel Opera was offered and accepted. A manager from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra heard him and duly invited him to Canada.

A chance stand-in engagement in Boston conducting Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was met with such ecstatic reviews and audience enthusiasm that he was offered dates with the finest orchestras. He was 48 and after his years spent in provincial theatres this sudden fame and fortune must have been overwhelming for such a sensitive man. Luckily for the musical world he then discovered the composer whose music would make his career; a composer who like himself, suffered from self-doubt: Gustav Mahler. He had had no chance to hear any of his music during his student years as it had been banned by the Nazis.

He was uniquely able to identify with Mahler’s life-and-death struggles and the shear intensity that he brought to the performances made them unforgettable. It could be argued that his concerts provided the stimulus for the major record companies to change their policy of recording exclusively in the studio to one of taping live and relying on careful editing to remove any blemishes.

His repertoire was far from limited to Mahler – the romantics from Beethoven to Richard Strauss all received thoroughly detailed and considered readings.

He was popular too with soloists – his experience as a repetiteur and soloist gave him an unique understanding of what they needed in an accompanist.

Everything seemed to be set fair but the angst that he would, like Mahler, die prematurely proved correct for in his 60th year throat cancer struck. Initially he was able to continue conducting if at a reduced pace, but gradually the disease took its awful toll. His final engagement was in Oxford where he rehearsed the University orchestra before receiving an honorary doctorate in June 1994.

It is highly appropriate that Klaus Tennstedt’s career should be reassessed in 2011 as it is the year that not only marks the centenary of Mahler’s death but also what would have been the year of Tennstedt’s 85th birthday.

In the last half of the 20th century Gustav Mahler came to hold a dominant position in the consciousness of musicians and audiences. Though he died in 1911, he captures the anxieties and aspirations of the modern age in symphonies and songs which, while utterly personal in expression, strike a universal chord. These critically acclaimed recordings, made between 1949 and 2010, feature some of the greatest Mahler conductors, singers and orchestras. With three songs newly recorded by Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano, this set offers a complete portrait of a man who speaks to us now as urgently as he has ever done.

Gustav Mahler was born on 7th July 1860 in Kalischt (now Kalište), a small village in the Royal Province of Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, the second child of a Jewish family; seven of their fourteen children died in infancy. His childhood was spent in the local town of Iglau (now Jihlava) where the family had moved not long after his birth. Noticing his talent early his parent arranged piano lessons when he was six. It cannot be said that his was a happy childhood as his father, who had persuaded his parents-in-law to force their daughter to marry him, vented his anger against her for all the actual and perceived wrongs done during his attempts to improve his life.

Mahler later summed up his family’s plight thus: I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout all the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

At 15 Mahler was admitted to the Vienna Conservatoire to study harmony and composition as well as piano; three years later Mahler attended Anton Bruckner’s lectures at Vienna University. It was during this period that the two works which survive from his teenage compositions were written: The movement for Piano Quartet (1876?-1878?) and Das klagende Lied which was submitted for a competition in 1880 where the jury was led by Brahms, but failed to win a prize. Over the next few years he revised the latter work and wrote a number of songs but he was obtaining more work as a conductor and at successively larger opera houses. In Leipzig he made such a success with parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen when Arthur Nikisch fell ill that both critics and public alike sang his praises. He became music director of the opera in Budapest for three years in 1888, the following year the city hosted the premiere of his first symphony, then in five movements. Hamburg was next to secure his services from 1891 to 1897 during which time he revised the first, wrote the second and sketched the third symphony. These three together with the fourth are sometimes referred to as the “Wunderhorn” symphonies owing to their use of or containing influences of the songs which appear in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn).

He was then offered the most prestigious post in music in the Austrian Empire, that of Director of the Vienna State Opera. Mahler, who had never been a devout Jew, converted to Roman Catholicism in preparation for the appointment. He had sung in a Catholic choir as a boy and would set the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus as the first part of his eighth symphony.

In March 1902 he had married Alma Schindler, twenty years his younger, and she gave birth to two daughters. His work at this time was spent on three symphonies and songs set to poems by Friedrich Rückert. It was alas all too prophetic to compose songs on deaths of children, Kindertotenlieder, when you have two young children as his first daughter died of diphtheria at the age of four – thought to be represented by the first of two hammer-blows in the last movement of his sixth and most bleakly tragic symphony. The songs are bound up musically with these symphonies especially the fifth which contains the famous Adagietto. The second hammer-blow is thought to refer either the diagnosis of his heart disease or his resignation from the opera caused by obstinacy in artistic matters leading to increasingly nasty anti-semitic attacks; there was a third – for his own death? – but this was removed in the revisions. He needed to get away from Europe and luckily a generous offer from the Metropolitan Opera gave him the 1908 season in America, but then he was replaced by Toscanini. Back in Europe his marriage was collapsing owing to Alma’s infidelity. These were the days of the completion of Das Lied von der Erde and the ninth symphony but such was Mahler’s fixation of the ninth (Beethoven’s last symphony – also for Bruckner and Dvorák) that he regarded Das Lied as a symphony with voices and therefore the next one would be the tenth! He began yet another one but left it incomplete and performing versions have been written by various composers.

Some people criticise Mahler for being so preoccupied by death but, in reality, he was really full of life. His symphonies should, he said, “take in the whole world”. It cannot be denied that the music he wrote for the “final departure” is so achingly beautiful and heartfelt that one should just listen and be moved, hopefully, to tears as he no doubt was as he penned the final notes. According to Alma his last word was “Mozartl” (a diminutive, corresponding to ‘dear little Mozart’); he is buried in Grinzing Cemetery outside Vienna.

Mahler’s influences on subsequent generations have been extensive and wide – Zemlinsky, Schönberg, Berg and Webern in Austria, Shostakovitch in Russia, Britten in Britain and Copland in America are just a few to acknowledge their debt. He also spread beyond the limits of classical music with Paul McCartney writing “I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of The Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we’d take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was great.”

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.

The Carl Schuricht Edition includes 20 CD and a DVD with a portrait of Carl Schuricht, one of the most important conductors of the 20th century. Also you will find Mahlers second symphony in the interpretation style of Carl Schuricht. This rare document of music history is the only existing recording of this symphony by Schuricht.

In more recent years, every Abbado recording has been an event, something special – whether his Mahler symphonies with Berlin, or the Mozart, Bach and Pergolesi projects with “his” Orchestra Mozart. And, of course, as a sponsor and champion of new orchestras he is unrivalled – not least with his most recent creations, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Orchestra Mozart.

THE SYMPHONY EDITION – OVERVIEW

His Grand-Old-Man status assured Abbado remains a modest, unassuming but tenaciously demanding orchestral leader. Now, to celebrate the maestro’s reaching his 80th year, we have prepared an ambitious Symphony Edition as a birthday tribute:

• Limited-edition 41-CD box set

• Complete recordings of eight great symphonists – Mozart (with Orchestra Mozart), Haydn, Beethoven (with Berliner Philharmoniker), Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler (with Berliner Phliharmoniker and Lucerne festival Orchestra)

• Featuring seven of the orchestras with whom Abbado is most closely associated (Orchestra Mozart, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, London Symphony, Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Lucerne Festival Orchestra)

• Complete symphonic cycles of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Mahler (see attachment for complete track list).

• All recordings have been personally selected by Claudio Abbado

IN PARTICULAR…

• Bruckner’s First Symphony – a special “addition”: at Abbado’s request, we have licensed a live recording of Bruckner’s First Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, being released here for the first time anywhere.

• He had previously recorded the first version (the “Linz” version, 1866) of the Symphony with the Wiener Philharmoniker, but has since discovered and championed the later expanded “Vienna” version (carried out by Bruckner in 1890–91) – a not uncontroversial step!

• Is this such a big deal? Anyone who has heard performances of the symphony that Abbado has given with the orchestra on tour in recent months will know that this is an electrifying account, one that changes the way we should regard the work. It’s the first CD to go for in the Edition (and will be offered as advance music)!

• In sum, a superb addition to the Symphony Edition, and to Abbado’s discogaphy (also to be released in a separate Bruckner box later).

• Parallel to this Edition, Decca is releasing a 7-CD set of the early Abbado recordings on Decca

PACKAGING

• The attractive cube features four striking, dynamic portraits of Abbado from the 1970s to the present day.

• The 96-page four-language booklet has an interview with Abbado by journalist Julia Spinola (formerly of the Frankfürter Allgemeine) plus many photos.

An edition of the works of 13 composers, from Mozart to Shostakovich.

95 symphonies on 50 CDs.

Symphonic cycles by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms.

All of Carlos Kleiber’s DG symphonic recordings are there (Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms).

Signal contributions by Claudio Abbado (Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler), Leonard Bernstein (Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, Shostakovich), Karl Böhm (Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms), Carlo Maria Giulini (Bruckner), Herbert von Karajan (Bruckner, Tchaikovsky) and James Levine (Mozart).

Brilliant individual contributions by Pierre Boulez (Mahler 6), Myung-Whung Chung (Dvořák), John Eliot Gardiner (Schubert, Mendelssohn) and Lorin Maazel (Dvořák).

COVER ART / BOOKLET

More noble, evocative artwork, conceived in purely graphical terms, is difficult to imagine.

The 80-page booklet has a newly-commissioned introduction on the DG / Wiener Philharmoniker relationship by Dr. Clemens Hellsberg, violinist and director of the board of the orchestra, a full tracklist and photos of the artists.