Luogo e data di registrazione		All Saints' Church, Tooting, London (Gran Bretagna): - maggio 1992 (Symphonie No. 7) - novembre 1992 (Kindertotenlieder)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Co-production		Pål Christian Moe (Kindertotelnlieder)
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Recording Engineer		Hans-Rudolf Müller (Symphonie No. 7), Stephan Flock (Kindertotenlieder)
	Editing		Hans Kipfer (Symphonie No. 7), Oliver Rogalla (Kindertotenlieder)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 437 851-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 51' 34" & 62' 27" | (p) 1994 | 4D DDD
	Note		-

Symphonie Nr. 7 A music historian with a taste for melodrama might be tempted to describe Mahler’s Seventh Symphony as the musical composition which embodies the precise moment of Romanticism’s collapse - a collapse which took traditional symphonic form and tonality down with it, as Mahler’s Viennese friend Arnold Schoenberg was the first to recognize. A more temperate historian might point out that, while Mahler’s Seventh is undoubtedly in the category of the problematic, its special qualities make sense if the work is seen as the composer’s answer to his uncompromisingly “final” Sixth Symphony. As, in effect, a new start, it also had inestimable value in helping Mahler to prepare for the achievements of the last two completed symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde - works which gave early notice that (despite Schoenberg and his disciples) the 20th century would remain deeply divided on the issue of whether or not Romanticism, tonality and traditional symphonic form had collapsed at all. Now that the Seventh Symphony is regularly performed and recorded as a valued part of the Mahler canon it is less necessary to find excuses for it, but still useful to consider its special qualities. Particularly special is its tendency to exaggerate - to test to breaking point - many of the most personal aspects of style and structure found in Mahler’s earlier symphonies. Melodramatic music history may raise its head again in the suggestion that the Seventh seems to be the work of a composer profoundly aware of the instability of all that he held dear, not least in his personal life, and in the further suggestion that this awareness motivated this defiant outpouring of a creative personality unable to identify with the new Schoenbergian radicalism, yet also unable to defend the old Romanticism with any great conviction. After all, even if the commonsense view prevails that the work, and especially the Finale, is simply less good than most of its fellows in the Mahler canon, the question remains: why? The Seventh seems to be the work in which Mahler most pressingly felt the need to combine attack and defence, the work that calls conventional symphonic criteria into question while at the same time seeking to reassert their continuing validity. It is, in other words, something of an experiment after the deeply personal drama of the Sixth, and it is therefore hardly surprising if the result is less polished and less coherent than Mahler at his best. The source of the Seventh Symphony lies in the fertile summer of 1904, when Mahler’s compositional activity during his holiday break from the trials and tribulations of operatic politics in Vienna included the completion of the Sixth Symphony and the Kindertotenlieder. With the overwhelmingly tragic end of the Sixth fresh in his mind, as well as the serene but sorrowful resignation that concludes the songs, it is understandable that he should have begun to think of his next project as closer in spirit to the Symphony no. 5: progressing, in essence, from despair to joy, tragedy to triumph. Even so, the only contributions to this scheme composed during the summer of 1904 were the Seventh’s eventual second and fourth movements, both called Nachtmusik, and both at some remove from the main, more substantial structures which the work would need. Not until the summer of 1905 was Mahler able to get down to the symphony’s principal movements, and there were difficulties, especially with the first, which seems to have been, in drafting terms, the last to fall into place. It may therefore be that it was this process of composing the symphony “inside out”, as it were, that provoked Mahler into questioning the continuing validity of the kind of inevitable progressions to serenity, triumph or tragedy on which his earlier works had depended. The triumph that ends the Fifth Symphony preserves an unambiguously heroic tone, due mainly to the strong lyric profile of the movement’s main material. By contrast, the Finale of the Seventh, by appearing to aspire to a spirit of ebullient comedy, reveals a much more equivocal response to the heroics articulated in the first movement. The Finale seems, to use a favourite late-20th-century word, more a deconstruction of the work’s heroic spirit than its fulfilment. These essential conflicts and diversities of mood are reflected in the Seventh Symphony’s basic materials. The main thematic ideas derive from those Mahlerian melodic archetypes that appear in all his works like an obsessively repeated signature. But these familiar landmarks are offset by disorientating shifts of tonality and by radical contrasts of orchestral colouring. For example, to speak of an overall progression from the B minor of the first movement’s slow introduction to the C major of the Finale - even though that C tonality is present in part of the first movement and dominates the second - is to imply a consistently evolving, Romantic journey of the kind that is perfectly appropriate for the Fifth Symphony as it travels from its C sharp minor Funeral March to its life-affirming D major Finale. In the Seventh, however, the Finale’s overall C tonality is not so much an affirmative answer to the first movement’s stressful E tonality as an assertion of difference, a dismissal as much as a resolution. It is in this sense that the work most powerfully questions what it also attempts to preserve - the fundamentals of Mahlerian symphonic coherence. When it comes to matters of style, the first movement has the epic-Romantic qualities familiar from earlier Mahler - the Sixth Symphony, in particular. The plangent tenor horn theme that launches the slow introduction over a muffled, throbbing accompaniment inevitably evokes that favourite Mahlerian genre of the funeral march, and although this is then transformed into the ultimately jubilant fast march of the main Allegro, carried forward on a compelling tide of aspiration and excitement, a strongly idealistic spirit remains in evidence, most obviously in the rapt chorale-like theme which recalls the self-sacrificing Senta’s music in Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. In the first Nachtmusik movement the mood shifts from heroic to pastoral, but the march-character is maintained, in a brilliantly conceived confrontation between folklike material and a sinister military gait, where it becomes impossible to disentangle birdsong from bugle calls. The Scherzo is cast as a fast ländler, marked Schattenhaft (“shadowy”), a quintessentially Mahlerian dance in which the macabre is never far from the surface, and attempts to establish a more relaxed atmosphere simply provoke resistance and greater anxiety: this is summed up at the end, where the abrupt dismissal of minor-key harmony by a major chord, despite its apparent finality, leaves an air of instability. After this, the wistful romancing of the Andante amoroso, which makes a special feature of the courtly timbres of guitar, mandolin and harp, goes as far as Mahler can to purging the anxieties of what has gone before - an effect all the more striking when one remembers that this movement was written before either the Scherzo or the first movement. In view of what is to come, the Andante amoroso might seem unreal in its romantic intimacy; while there is nothing false about its fleeting tenderness and beauty, the gentle moonlight is submerged in shadow from time to time, and even the more expansive, genial episode that provides the movement’s main contrast makes no lasting impact. The Rondo-Finale then subverts the spirit of all that precedes it in an exuberantly unholy confrontation between militarism and religion, march and chorale. Whereas earlier Mahler finales bring the turbulent and pastoral facets of Romantic feeling into a serene, an affirmative or a tragic synthesis, this one seems determined to exclude Romance in favour of a starker style in which comedy, a Falstaffian bluster and bravado, is king. There may be an ironic post-Wagnerian subtext in the way the symphony's nightmusic yields in the Finale to a day-music fraught with nightmarish instability, although the Finale sounds in places more like Die Meistersinger than those passages in Tristan und Isolde where the horrors of day and light are described. Be that as it may, there is a sense in which Mahler’s characteristically transcendent chorale music (which would be restored to its proper affirmative role in the Eighth Symphony) is transformed here into a defiantly secular hedonism, with an insistence that has as much of hysteria as of joy about it. As a Rondo whose contrasts seem to be inserted for maximum dislocatory effect, the movement can even be understood as a parody of a Nietzschean, Dionysiac dithyramb, wild in spirit yet curiously simple in musical language. Arnold Whittall Kindertotenlieder The Seventh’s Finale can be seen as a complex attempt on Mahler’s part to express his deeply ambivalent feelings about life in general and symphonic form in particular: or it can be seen, more simply, as a failed attempt to match the Fifth Symphony’s extended happy ending. Either way it reinforces the conviction that Mahler’s expressive world was a rich amalgam of opposed elements - innocence and bitterness, joy and despair, and in no work of his are these oppositions more starkly presented than in the Kindertotenlieder. Critical response to Mahler’s decision to set these touchingly fragile poems by Friedrich Rückert is inevitably coloured by the knowledge that, three years after their completion in 1904, Mahler’s daughter Maria died, not yet five, from scarlet fever. For life to imitate art in this way is distressing enough, but it is at least possible for those who appreciate art to argue convincingly that the extreme and unmediated emotions of real life are transcended here in small-scale structures which, by way of subtle harmonic inflections and telling formal refinements, avoid the maudlin and the lachrymose. Kindertotenlieder is in the tradition of the 19th-century cycle or set of songs (normally with piano accompaniment) which, while not offering a specific narrative, are linked by common subject-matter. Mahler underlines the relatedness by casting the first and last songs in the same key, and also grouping the three other songs around similar tonalities. Tempos are predominantly slow, but variety of rhythmic character prevents monotony, and few other Romantic compositions make such effectivc use of that basic contrast between the spare bleakness of minor-key music and the warmth, however illusory, of major harmony. In particular, the first and final songs of the set reflect a comparable strategy in the first song of Schubert’s Winterreise. The progression in Mahler’s final song from narrative (the storm, the fear) to resolution (reflections on the peace of heaven) could have offered only a macabre aestheticization of a theme that seems to defy artistic treatment. Some listeners may still resist what they believe to be Mahler’s sentimental endorsement of Rückert’s saccharine religiosity. For others, however, the melodic poise of the final stanza, and the moment where words cease and the melody passes from the voice to the solo horn, offer an experience that is neither empty nor exploitative. Just as in his setting of Das himmlische Leben at the end of the Fourth Symphony Mahler was able to resolve that work’s diverse elements into a convincing vision of innocent sublimity, so at the end of Kindertotenlieder he draws true serenity out of extreme despair. Whether or not this can quite dispel the bitterness of the first song’s minor key salute to “the joyful light of day” is one of those questions which Mahler’s music invites us to leave unanswered. Arnold Whittall