The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra is regularly hailed as one of the world’s finest youth orchestras. Founded by the exceptional conductor Claudio Abbado, the project serves as a hub for highly talented young musicians, who are given the opportunity to perform alongside established stars of the classical music world. Together with Kirill Petrenko – the acclaimed chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic – they will perform, among other works, Gustav Mahler’s tenderly moving Fifth Symphony.
Mahler’s Fifth has been immortalised, if not before, then certainly since Luchino Visconti’s film »Death in Venice«. The tender Adagietto provided such a fitting backdrop to the feverish imagery of the Thomas Mann adaptation that, for many, the film immediately begins to play in their minds the moment the music starts. During the composer’s lifetime, the symphony was not well received, as Mahler himself admitted: »The Fifth is a cursed work. Nobody understands it.« Today, it is one of his most frequently performed symphonies.
Paul Hindemith’s Concert Music for String Orchestra and Brass combines Baroque forms with modern harmony and driving rhythms. It is exemplary of Hindemith’s neoclassicism: clear structures, contrapuntal density and a powerful yet transparent orchestral sound that gives this short work its drive.
PERFORMERS
Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester orchestra
Kirill Petrenko conductor
PROGRAM
Paul Hindemith
Konzertmusik for Strings and Brass, Op. 50
- Interval -
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
