Richard Strauss and Mahler make a pair in this concert featuring one of Mahler’s most popular symphonies – the one with the heartbreakingly beautiful Adagietto for strings and harp.
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Ashkenazy says it’s not just interesting but right to play the music of Richard Strauss alongside Mahler. They could have been rivals, but were friends, even though musically, as Mahler put it, they were like miners, tunnelling from opposite sides and “meeting on their subterranean ways”.
From one side this concert unearths the overture from Strauss’s first opera and strikes a seam of witty allusion in the virtuoso Burleske for piano and orchestra. From the other side comes Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, making its way from the sombre tread of a funeral march to the ecstasy of its finale. But our hearts are won by the musical declaration of love embraced by these two extremes: the Symphony’s Adagietto, in which strings and harp give voice to a wordless passion.
R STRAUSS Guntram: Prelude to Act 1
R STRAUSS Burleske for piano and orchestra
MAHLER Symphony No.5
Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Clemens Leske piano
PRE-CONCERT TALKS
Free pre-concert talk by Raff Wilson in the Northern Foyer, 45 minutes before each concert.
AUDIO PLAYER LISTING
Track 1 – R STRAUSS Burleske for piano and orchestra: excerpt
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Herbert Blomstedt
DECCA 480 0404
Track 2 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 1st movement (Funeral March)
Track 3 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 3rd movement (Scherzo)
Track 4 – MAHLER Symphony No.5: 4th movement (Adagietto)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelik.
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 463 738-2
Audio kindly supplied by Universal Music.
Currently available from iTunes:
Strauss Burleske
Mahler