Luogo e data di registrazione		Watford Town Hall, London (Gran Bretagna) - febbraio 1991
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Editing		Jörg Ritter
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 437 527-2 | LC 0173 | 1 CD - 58' 03" | (p) 1993 | DDD
	Note		-

Soon after completing his Fourth Symphony, in the summer of 1900, Mahler told a correspondent that “this one is quite fundamentally different from my other symphonies”; yet he informed another friend that the work provided a “conclusion” to its three predecessors. The contradiction is more apparent than real. Mahler’s first four symphonies are all involved with song in various ways, and nos. 2, 3 and 4 contain settings of texts from the early 19th-century collection of folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. But it is precisely because no. 4 continues and intensifies the “song” aspect of its predecessors that it differs “fundamentally” from them. The similarity of basic approach stimulated a crucial change of style. The song “Das himmlische Leben” - a child’s vision of paradise - was already seven years old when Mahler conceived the Fourth Symphony, so it would be remarkable if it proved to have had no influence on the material and character of the work - as indeed it had already had on the Third Symphony, in which Mahler had originally planned to include it. But the problem Mahler now set himself was quite specific. What kind of symphony could effectively end with such a relatively slight movement? Late Romantic finales had not been notable for charm and good humour. They were crowning glories rather than unassuming afterthoughts, and all three of Mahler’s earlier symphonies had ended with heaven-storming affirmations of tonal and spiritual resolution. Any rejection of such emphatic culmination might therefore be expected to promote wholesale rethinking of the entire symphonic scheme. Though short in itself, “Das himmlische Leben” did not in the event provoke a radically new concentration in the Fourth Symphony as a whole: the first three movements are all substantial structures. The song’s light-hearted tone undoubtedly generates the style of the first movement, which involves a very Mahlerian kind of neo-classicism - strongly contrapuntal, referring explicitly to the diatonic, cadential formulae of Haydn and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, the symphony’s strength of character stems from the need not to exclude moments of drama and high emotion, but to give them a new context: to subordinate them in ways which would allow “Das himmlische Leben” to emerge as a logical outcome, a distillation, of the preceding symphonic process. The first movement establishes this new manner to perfection in the playful formality of its principal ideas and the sharply etched nature of its orchestration, with woodwind and trumpets particularly prominent. Mahler seems determined to keep tension at a low level in the exposition, which ends with greater finality than classical orthodoxy would ever have allowed. In the development, however, geniality reveals a darker side, and a masterful series of modulations engineer a climax of great emotional power. In the reprise the warmly lyrical contrasting theme is almost parodied: it is as if Mahler wants the listener to question how seriously he is taking his material, in order to enhance the spontaneity of the movement's final stages. Here courtly good humour and delight in technical expertise evoke the finale’s image of first-class professional musicians - “treffliche Hofmusikanten”. The second movement has the easy rhythmic flow of a Ländler or a minuet, but its sinuous themes and shifting harmonies quickly turn sinister, spectral, with the quality of a danse macabre. At one stage Mahler called the movement “Death takes the fiddle", and the prominent solo violin enhances the ghostly atmosphere. The more relaxed mood of the contrasting sections can never fully establish itself in this environment, and the movement ends with the abruptness of a sudden awakening from a disturbing dream. The slow movement counters this, initially, with music of expansive serenity. But a tonal switch from major to minor is all it takes to create an emotional crisis, and the movement evolves through alternalions. Two increasingly hectic variations of the main theme frame a turbulent rethinking of the minor key episode. But after the second variation, when stability and serenity are restored, it seems that the movement is destined to subside into a rapt, reticent coda. So it does, but not before a sudden explosion of triumphant fanfares prefigures the finale’s vision of paradise. Even so, the question remains: how can the setting of such a slight, light-hearted text ensure a fitting end to a work of such wide emotional range and textural sophistication? Mahler answers the question by creating the impression that the finale’s spirit, as well as its actual material, is distilled from what has preceded it. Motivic associations with the exuberant first movement are clear, and there is also a basic shift of tonality, from G major to E major, which ties in with the slow movement’s most dramatic moment. The scherzo’s sinister dance is here transmuted into the angels’ carefree skipping. Mahler also confronts the poem’s challenge head on. “There’s no music on earth / that can be compared [with that of heaven]”, the poem proclaims. But the touching simplicity of Mahler’s ending, encapsulated in the singer’s final descending scale, offers a gentle corrective. The whole work has been designed to express and explore a special musical innocence and joy without lapsing into primitivism or monotony. Symphony resolves into song, and dramatic tension dissolves into the gentle flow of the final procession, a transfigured march receding into infinity on the last note of the double basses: the music of paradise regained. Arnold Whittall