CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. Recorded at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, 17 April 2011 Producer – Misha Donat Engineer – Jonathan Stokes, Classic Sound Ltd Design – With Relish (for the Philharmonia Orchestra) and Darren Rumney Cover image CLebrecht Music & Arts MAHLER LORIN MAAZEL P2013 Philharmonia Orchestra C2013 Signum Records SYMPHONY NO. 2, RESURRECTION 24 1 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. “On Mahler” Mahler’s earlier symphonies frequently draw GUSTAV MAHLER on the world of his Wunderhorn songs – A century after his death, Mahler’s music settings of simple folk poems about birds and SYMPHONY NO. 2, RESURRECTION resonates more powerfully than ever. Its animals, saints and sinners, soldiers and their unique mix of passionate intensity and lovers. But this apparently naive, even childlike CD1 terrifying self-doubt seems to speak directly to tone is found alongside vast musical our age. One moment visionary, the next 1 I. Allegro maestoso 25.13 canvasses that depict the end of the world. In despairing, this is music that sweeps us up in quieter, more intimate movements, Mahler CD2 its powerful current and draws us along in its seems to speak intimately and directly to the 1 II. Andante moderato. Sehr gemächlich 11.25 drama. We feel its moments of ecstatic rapture listener, but the big outer movements are 2 III. Scherzo. In ruhig fliessender Bewegung 12.14 and catastrophic loss as if they were our own. addressed to the entire world. At its most This is not music for detached contemplation: sentimental, Mahler’s music echoes the fairy- 3 IV. ‘Urlicht’. Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht 5.23 it matters to us, urgently and directly. Its tales of children’s picture books, yet in the 4 V. Finale 38.32 musical language may be romantic, but what next moment it marches with gritted teeth and Total timings: 92.41 makes Mahler’s music so distinctively modern unleashes terrifying violence. is its unflinching honesty – its embrace of the contradictions of life and of art. Few All this makes for great symphonic dramas, composers wrote music of such searing lyrical often lasting more than an hour, which imply a PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA intensity, nor music that is often ironic to the vivid sense of storytelling without ever being point of parody. But it took a long time for this BBC SYMPHONY CHORUS confined to a specific programme (as a young unique tone to be understood; in his own man, Mahler adopted the idea of programmes SALLY MATTHEWS SOPRANO time, critics heard Mahler’s ability to see the from the tone poems of Richard Strauss, but MICHELLE DEYOUNG MEZZO-SOPRANO world from several perspectives as a sign of soon abandoned them). This is a composer LORIN MAAZEL CONDUCTOR insincerity. Today, we tend to read it as quite who insisted that the symphony should www.signumrecords.com the opposite. ‘include the whole world’ – hence its 2 3 23 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. bewildering mix of different characters, and and annotations on his scores, he encouraged Symphony No. 2, Resurrection movement of the Second Symphony, Mahler the sense that, for him, it worked rather like listening to his music as a kind of (1894) specifically underlined the overlap between the the great novels of the 19th century, such as autobiography, as Berlioz had before him. two works, insisting that in this movement ‘it is those by Dostoyevsky or Balzac. Mahler’s Second Symphony was already begun the hero of my D major symphony [the First] But like all great art, Mahler’s music far before his First had received its première. whom I bear to the grave’. We should remember that Mahler was a man exceeds the life that made it, just as it far Indeed, the composition in 1888 of a of the theatre who, for the 30 years of his exceeds his own age. His symphonies look movement in C minor, later to become the first So why, if the huge first movement was already professional life, spent most of his time and back to those of Beethoven and Schubert, but movement of the Second Symphony, seems to in place by the summer of 1888, did it take energy conducting in the opera house. He at the same time forwards to the music of have overlapped with the completion of the Mahler seven years to bring his Second knew how to create an effect, to stage a scene Shostakovich and Britten. In his later works he First. It shares with the Finale of the First the Symphony to completion? The disappointing and to pace a drama. But, like anyone who has was increasingly drawn to the music of Bach, same tone of high drama and desperate heroic reception of his First, in 1889, may well have worked in the theatre, he had an acute sense at the same time that his own music was struggle, but now played out on a grander, been a factor, and he was certainly that all art is ultimately artifice and make- revered by the young Schoenberg and his more objective scale. Moreover, there is good preoccupied with forging his career as a believe. His favourite writers were those whose pupils. This is music that crosses historical evidence to suggest that it had its origins in the conductor (he became Director of the Royal works underline their own fictionality which is boundaries – as contemporary and vital now same upheavals of Mahler’s life – not least, the Hungarian Opera in Budapest, 1889, and why, after the dust of the drama has settled, as it was a hundred years ago. ending of his affair with Marion von Weber. By Principal Conductor at Hamburg Stadttheater there is a quality of Mahler’s music that recalls the autumn of 1888, Mahler had decided that in 1891). But with the revision of his First the enchanted forest of Shakespeare’s A this movement was a single-movement Symphony in 1893, and the promise of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. symphonic poem, which he called Todtenfeier second performance, he seems to have (Funeral Rites). The scholar Stephen Hefling returned to the idea of a second symphony. In Perhaps it is this many-sided character to the has shown that the title and the mood are the intervening years Mahler was certainly not music that feeds our fascination with Mahler probably derived from the long dramatic poem, inactive as a composer. This is the period in himself. Of course, this was fuelled by the Dziady, by the Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, which he wrote the majority of his Wunderhorn composer. Mahler subscribed fully to the translated by Mahler’s close friend, Siegfried songs, a first group for voice and piano, and a Romantic idea that art is made from the life of Lipiner, early in 1887. And, much later, after second group conceived as orchestral songs. the artist and, in comments to friends, letters, Maestro Lorin Maazel the symphonic poem had become the first And it was through the Wunderhorn settings 4 5 4 5 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. that Mahler seems to have found his way back Mahler’s increasing frustration at being unable emerge from out of the distance as far as the this wistful dance movement is certainly a to symphonic composition. to ‘discover’ the elusive conclusion to his eye can see; the writer Rudolf Stephan world away from the stark opening movement. symphony was famously broken during a referred to the Second Symphony as ‘music Its echo of Schubert underlines the sense that He spent the summer of 1893 in the small memorial service held for the great Wagnerian drama without scenery’ and it is certainly hard Mahler’s music here is an act of nostalgia, a village of Steinbach on the Attersee (one of the conductor, Hans von Bülow, in March 1894. not to think of movements like this one in such recollected moment of earlier happiness from beautiful lakes of Austria’s Salzkammergut The sound of a boys choir, placed high up in visual or even filmic terms. The ferocious the life of his symphonic hero, as Mahler was region). As he turned 33 years old that July, the cathedral, singing a setting of Klopstock’s opening of the work (more a sudden violent to characterise it later. If Schubert is evoked by Mahler had written two ‘symphonic poems’ and Resurrection Chorale, mingled with the funeral gesture than a musical motif) and the ensuing the opening dance, the contrasting section some songs, but nothing currently designated bells, seems to have crystallised Mahler’s march figure give way to one of Mahler’s most that follows is closer to the fairy music of as a symphony. The day after his birthday, he thinking. After conducting a performance of pleading second themes, but its vision of quiet Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream completed the Wunderhorn song Des Antonius Siegfried’s Funeral Music from Wagner’s deliverance is, at this stage, still impossibly or some of Weber’s evocations of the von Padua Fischpredigt and, within eight days, Götterdämmerung on the steps of the distant. The movement as a whole seems supernatural. The movement is not without its had turned it into the symphonic Scherzo that cathedral, he reportedly hurried home to defined instead by the snarling returns of the passing clouds, and distant rumbling on the would become the third movement of the sketch the ideas for his own Finale.