Search - Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Michael Gielen :: Gustav Mahler: Kindertotenlieder

Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Michael Gielen
Gustav Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Genres: Pop, Classical

Track Listings (8) - Disc #1
1. Kindertotenlieder, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra): Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n
2. Kindertotenlieder, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra): Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen
3. Kindertotenlieder, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra): Wenn dien M?tterlein
4. Kindertotenlieder, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra): Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen
5. Kindertotenlieder, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra): In diesem Wetter
6. Symphony No. 10 in F sharp minor (incomplete)
7. Passacaglia for orchestra, Op. 1
8. Im Sommerwind, idyll for orchestra

CD Details

All Artists: Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Michael Gielen, Freiburg, SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden, Kornelia Kallisch, Mezzo-Soprano
Title: Gustav Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Hanssler Classics
Original Release Date: 1/1/2000
Re-Release Date: 5/1/2003
Genres: Pop, Classical
Styles: Vocal Pop, Historical Periods, Modern, 20th, & 21st Century, Symphonies
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPCs: 040888306221, 4010276013129

Synopsis

Album Description

Rückert wrote 425 Kintertotenlieder; Mahler chose but five. It is interesting to note that each poem Mahler chose to set to music deals with light and darkness, symbolizing eternal life and hope, versus despair and death, in both the literal sense and the literary sense. This song cycle is one of immense comfort, and is one of the high-points of late-Romantic orchestral songs. To those people who think that Mahler's music is death-laden music written by a death-obsessed neurotic: Listen! Mahler tried to encompass the world in his music, and death is an indivisible part of life. Given the circumstances he lived in, he could have chosen to write nothing but self-pitying music. But in his music and in his Kindertotenlieder, Mahler aims to uplift, to comfort, to offer solace and friendship to those who have ever been sad, or distraught, or in despair, or disappointed. Listen to it, be touched, be comforted.

CD Reviews

Lovely, soft-grained Webern, but the Mahler lacks any passio

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 10/28/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The imaginative couplings, always a Gielen specialty, are undone by readings that lack passion. Although she is smooth-voiced and assured as a singer, contralto Cornelia Kallisch cummunicates no grief at all: these could be songs of regret that a child went in for an appendectomy. Gielen's orchestral work is careful and faceless. Mahler without passion is pointless in the end, unless you fully buy into the notion that all music should be played objectively, whatever that means.

We've had too many great readings of the shattering Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Sym. to make do with a seviceably played, fairly quick, but uninvolving rendition like Gielen's -- his phrasing is devoid of nuance, his climaxes less than earthshaking. Which leaves two ealry works from Webern when he stood firmly in Mahler's world and hadn't yet invented his own. Gielen feels at home in this idiom, but his readings are fairly casual and laid back compared with Boulez's near-definitive ones."