Album details
About the album
About the album
Gustav Mahler composed his Ninth Symphony in 1909/1910, his first season of two as conductor of the New York Philharmonic; it was to be his last completed symphony.
Describing the complex emotions of the composer at this stage in his life and his career, Simon Rattle has said, "Mahler was in his late forties, … at the height of his powers. He was not an old man, although he was ill [with an incurable heart ailment]. … This is somebody who believed in making the symphony the whole world. And the whole world around him was crumbling … But his own feeling of mortality, the tragedies of the deaths of his children, his feeling that he could not hold on to what was around him, I think is much more important. And his idea that there was a whole new world of music there [that] he wouldn't witness but which he could sense. … a lot of this music is Schoenberg, Berg and Webern …it's fragments so tiny that they're hardly there. And you [can] feel how desperately he wanted to be part of this new world, and how he knew he could not be. This is why there's this tremendous bitter-sweet sensation [in the Ninth Symphony]."
When Alban Berg saw the score to the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, he wrote to his future wife, "The first movement is the most heavenly thing Mahler ever wrote. It is the expression of an exceptional fondness for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy nature to its depths – before death comes." Before the end of his second New York Philharmonic season, Mahler collapsed and was taken back to Vienna, where he died on May 18, 1911.
Simon Rattle has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2002. In the summer of 2007, they gave four performances of Wagner’s Die Walküre and four programmes of symphonic works by Berlioz, Pascal Dusapin, Debussy and Ravel at the Aix-en-Provence Festival followed by performances of works by Mahler, Brahms, Schumann, Ligeti, Stravinsky and Gubaidulina at the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals.
The Berliner Philharmoniker celebrates its 125th anniversary in the 2007/2008 season, during which Simon Rattle will lead 72 of 93 symphony concerts in Berlin and on tour in Austria, Switzerland, the U.S.A., France, the Baltic States and Scandinavia
Sir Simon has an association with EMI dating back to the 1970s that has resulted in many award-winning and ground-breaking releases. Previous critically acclaimed recordings with the Berliner Philharmonker encompass works by Bruckner, Brahms, Holst, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Mahler and Debussy. Their release of Holst's The Planets won 'Classical Recording of the Year' at the 2007 Classical Brit Awards.
