BRKlassik
Concert of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Head: Simon Rattle
Over the years and his steadily growing experience, Sir Simon Rattle is constantly deepening and refining his grasp of Gustav Mahler's cosmos. With the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rattle, now chief conductor, continues his Mahler exegesis after the "Song of the Earth", the Rückert Lieder, the Ninth and the Sixth with the peculiar Seventh Symphony. Strange because in the second and fourth positions of the five-movement work there is a night music that Mahler composed first: a notturno with distinctive horn calls and a delicately strung intermezzo, for which the orchestra needs a guitar and even a mandolin in addition to solo violin and harp. In between, a grotesque waltz scherzo unleashes a nocturnal haunting. The highly complex, huge first movement already gave Theodor W. Adorno a headache, while he had only mockery for the affirmative C major finale in allusion to Wagner's "Meistersinger": "Only the stage sky above the all too neighboring festival meadow is so blue." In any case, the label of the "cheerful character" of the Seventh, which Mahler himself gave to his E minor Symphony in order to praise it to his publisher, seems more than questionable. Rattle prefaces the gigantic work with a sonorous portrait of himself: a few years before his death in 2022, the British Siemens Music Prize winner Sir Harrison Birtwistle composed a short fanfare for his compatriot and friend Simon Rattle. The Latin title "Donum Simoni MMXVIII" describes a "gift for Simon" at his 2018 season opener with the London Symphony Orchestra. With its multifaceted percussion sounds and its violently pulsating rhythms, the gruff piece, which does not require strings, is probably tailor-made for the trained drummer Simon Rattle.
Harrison Birtwistle: "Donum Simoni MMXVIII" (A Gift for Simon 2018); Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in E minor
