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Mahler Festival: Fabio Luisi leads NHK Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (English)

Mahler Festival: Fabio Luisi leads NHK Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (English)

Main Hall
12 mei 2025
20.15 uur

Print dit programma

NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo
Fabio Luisi conductor
Ying Fang soprano
Matthias Goerne baritone

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Das irdische Leben
Urlicht
Revelge
Der Tamboursg’sell
from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ (1892-1901) 

interval ± 8.45PM

Symphony No. 4 in G major (1892, 1899-1900, revision 1901-10)
for orchestra and soprano
Bedächtig. Nicht eilen
In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast
Ruhevoll
Sehr behaglich: ‘Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden’ (from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’)

end ± 10.15PM

Main Hall 12 mei 2025 20.15 uur

NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo
Fabio Luisi conductor
Ying Fang soprano
Matthias Goerne baritone

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Das irdische Leben
Urlicht
Revelge
Der Tamboursg’sell
from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ (1892-1901) 

interval ± 8.45PM

Symphony No. 4 in G major (1892, 1899-1900, revision 1901-10)
for orchestra and soprano
Bedächtig. Nicht eilen
In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast
Ruhevoll
Sehr behaglich: ‘Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden’ (from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’)

end ± 10.15PM

Toelichting

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Songs from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’

door Aad van der Ven

In Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, song and symphony are intimately linked. This connection is especially evident in the period between 1880-1900, known as the ‘Wunderhorn years,’ when Mahler composed not only his first four symphonies but the Lie­der eines fahrenden Gesellen and songs based on texts from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) anthology. Mahler’s symphonic works from this time are suffused with the same folkloric quality as his songs, either in the form of a distant echo or a direct quote. In a few cases, Mahler transferred his songs in their entirety to a symphony (Urlicht, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, Es sungen Drei Engel).

Mahler’s selection of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn also reveals something about his youthful memories. He grew up in what was then the Moravian garrison city of Iglau (now Jihlava). There Mahler became familiar with soldiers playing their music while marching past the barracks. However, the ‘military’ texts found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are far from triumphant. Revelge (‘Reveille’: ‘Ich muss mar­schieren’) is one poignant example; it deals with a fatally injured drummer boy. In Der Tamboursg’sell (‘The Drummer Boy’) a comrade-in-arms receives a death sentence for desertion. Sometimes, Mahler skilfully unites declarations of love with martial music, as in Wo die schönen Tro­mpeten blasen, but these poems have a decidedly pacifistic tone.

Each of the songs in this cycle has its own orchestra, as it were, in which different instruments come to the fore, lending each song an ever-changing colour palette. Later, Mahler would expand his use of martial rhythms and trumpet calls, and along the way, the Ländler (Rheinlegendchen), a dance of the ‘common folk’, would gradually lose its innocence. Almost everything that makes Mahler a Mahler can already be found here.

Translation: Josh Dillon

In Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, song and symphony are intimately linked. This connection is especially evident in the period between 1880-1900, known as the ‘Wunderhorn years,’ when Mahler composed not only his first four symphonies but the Lie­der eines fahrenden Gesellen and songs based on texts from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) anthology. Mahler’s symphonic works from this time are suffused with the same folkloric quality as his songs, either in the form of a distant echo or a direct quote. In a few cases, Mahler transferred his songs in their entirety to a symphony (Urlicht, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, Es sungen Drei Engel).

Mahler’s selection of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn also reveals something about his youthful memories. He grew up in what was then the Moravian garrison city of Iglau (now Jihlava). There Mahler became familiar with soldiers playing their music while marching past the barracks. However, the ‘military’ texts found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are far from triumphant. Revelge (‘Reveille’: ‘Ich muss mar­schieren’) is one poignant example; it deals with a fatally injured drummer boy. In Der Tamboursg’sell (‘The Drummer Boy’) a comrade-in-arms receives a death sentence for desertion. Sometimes, Mahler skilfully unites declarations of love with martial music, as in Wo die schönen Tro­mpeten blasen, but these poems have a decidedly pacifistic tone.

Each of the songs in this cycle has its own orchestra, as it were, in which different instruments come to the fore, lending each song an ever-changing colour palette. Later, Mahler would expand his use of martial rhythms and trumpet calls, and along the way, the Ländler (Rheinlegendchen), a dance of the ‘common folk’, would gradually lose its innocence. Almost everything that makes Mahler a Mahler can already be found here.

Translation: Josh Dillon

door Aad van der Ven

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Symphony No. 4

door Rolf Hermsen

Gustav Mahler felt his symphonies should embrace the world – hence their length and almost cinematic, narrative character. Yet at their core, they are versions of one and the same thing: the inner cosmos of a great composer, Mahler’s own world. Despite being the shortest, most accessible and light-hearted of his nine completed symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 in G major is nonetheless an expression of the ‘complete’ Mahler. It is a quest for meaning amid the bewildering mystery of life – often in nature, sometimes through grotesque humour and always through sensuous orchestration, with waves of clear melody crashing over and over against dark abstraction. The symphony as a whole builds towards its vocal finale, Das himmlische Leben, a folk-poetic depiction of heaven seen through the eyes of a child – a quintessentially Mahlerian blend of high and low styles, in a heaven in which even children enjoy abundantly flowing wine, and animals are as endearing as they are edible.

The sleigh bells that herald in Das himmlische Leben are heard even in the very first bars of the symphony, setting in motion a journey whose final destination is heaven and which unfolds in three stages: life, death and despair. For no other composer are mountains and valleys of such literal majesty and of such profoundly figurative importance. In the second movement, death is portrayed in a manner befitting the Fourth’s relative levity – the solo violin is tuned in scordatura to produce a piercing, shrill tone evoking this archetypal image: Freund Hain (or ‘Death the Fiddler’), who plays a danse macabre on his fiddle. As Mahler’s indication for this part of the score shows, this is death in scherzo form. The third movement unsurpassably draws the helpless listener into the depths with a truly Mahlerian adagio that is ineffably melancholic, as indefinable as it is all-encompassing. This is followed by the joy of Das himmlische Leben like a kind of redemption (but did we actually wish to be redeemed?).

Gustav Mahler felt his symphonies should embrace the world – hence their length and almost cinematic, narrative character. Yet at their core, they are versions of one and the same thing: the inner cosmos of a great composer, Mahler’s own world. Despite being the shortest, most accessible and light-hearted of his nine completed symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 in G major is nonetheless an expression of the ‘complete’ Mahler. It is a quest for meaning amid the bewildering mystery of life – often in nature, sometimes through grotesque humour and always through sensuous orchestration, with waves of clear melody crashing over and over against dark abstraction. The symphony as a whole builds towards its vocal finale, Das himmlische Leben, a folk-poetic depiction of heaven seen through the eyes of a child – a quintessentially Mahlerian blend of high and low styles, in a heaven in which even children enjoy abundantly flowing wine, and animals are as endearing as they are edible.

The sleigh bells that herald in Das himmlische Leben are heard even in the very first bars of the symphony, setting in motion a journey whose final destination is heaven and which unfolds in three stages: life, death and despair. For no other composer are mountains and valleys of such literal majesty and of such profoundly figurative importance. In the second movement, death is portrayed in a manner befitting the Fourth’s relative levity – the solo violin is tuned in scordatura to produce a piercing, shrill tone evoking this archetypal image: Freund Hain (or ‘Death the Fiddler’), who plays a danse macabre on his fiddle. As Mahler’s indication for this part of the score shows, this is death in scherzo form. The third movement unsurpassably draws the helpless listener into the depths with a truly Mahlerian adagio that is ineffably melancholic, as indefinable as it is all-encompassing. This is followed by the joy of Das himmlische Leben like a kind of redemption (but did we actually wish to be redeemed?).

  • Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

    Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

  • Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

    Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

Owing to his duties as director of the Vienna Hofoper, Mahler composed during his summer holidays. After he completed the Third Symphony in 1896, it seemed as if his symphonic muse had fallen silent. Yet just before the end of his 1899 holiday, Mahler conceived a rough outline of the first three movements of the Fourth. It would not be until the following summer, though, that he would resume work on the symphony, completing it in just over a month, thanks in part to the fact that he had previously set Das himmlische Leben to music. Years prior, Mahler had earmarked the text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a collection of German folk poetry and an enduring source of inspiration for him – for a movement of a symphony rather than his song cycle of the same name, published in 1899, from which he had intentionally withheld it. Mahler’s work navigates the boundaries between late and post-Romanticism. Cracks start to appear in the harmonic edifice so revered by those of that generation, including Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who would later dismantle it further.

Translation: Josh Dillon

Owing to his duties as director of the Vienna Hofoper, Mahler composed during his summer holidays. After he completed the Third Symphony in 1896, it seemed as if his symphonic muse had fallen silent. Yet just before the end of his 1899 holiday, Mahler conceived a rough outline of the first three movements of the Fourth. It would not be until the following summer, though, that he would resume work on the symphony, completing it in just over a month, thanks in part to the fact that he had previously set Das himmlische Leben to music. Years prior, Mahler had earmarked the text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a collection of German folk poetry and an enduring source of inspiration for him – for a movement of a symphony rather than his song cycle of the same name, published in 1899, from which he had intentionally withheld it. Mahler’s work navigates the boundaries between late and post-Romanticism. Cracks start to appear in the harmonic edifice so revered by those of that generation, including Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who would later dismantle it further.

Translation: Josh Dillon

door Rolf Hermsen

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Songs from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’

door Aad van der Ven

In Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, song and symphony are intimately linked. This connection is especially evident in the period between 1880-1900, known as the ‘Wunderhorn years,’ when Mahler composed not only his first four symphonies but the Lie­der eines fahrenden Gesellen and songs based on texts from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) anthology. Mahler’s symphonic works from this time are suffused with the same folkloric quality as his songs, either in the form of a distant echo or a direct quote. In a few cases, Mahler transferred his songs in their entirety to a symphony (Urlicht, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, Es sungen Drei Engel).

Mahler’s selection of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn also reveals something about his youthful memories. He grew up in what was then the Moravian garrison city of Iglau (now Jihlava). There Mahler became familiar with soldiers playing their music while marching past the barracks. However, the ‘military’ texts found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are far from triumphant. Revelge (‘Reveille’: ‘Ich muss mar­schieren’) is one poignant example; it deals with a fatally injured drummer boy. In Der Tamboursg’sell (‘The Drummer Boy’) a comrade-in-arms receives a death sentence for desertion. Sometimes, Mahler skilfully unites declarations of love with martial music, as in Wo die schönen Tro­mpeten blasen, but these poems have a decidedly pacifistic tone.

Each of the songs in this cycle has its own orchestra, as it were, in which different instruments come to the fore, lending each song an ever-changing colour palette. Later, Mahler would expand his use of martial rhythms and trumpet calls, and along the way, the Ländler (Rheinlegendchen), a dance of the ‘common folk’, would gradually lose its innocence. Almost everything that makes Mahler a Mahler can already be found here.

Translation: Josh Dillon

In Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, song and symphony are intimately linked. This connection is especially evident in the period between 1880-1900, known as the ‘Wunderhorn years,’ when Mahler composed not only his first four symphonies but the Lie­der eines fahrenden Gesellen and songs based on texts from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) anthology. Mahler’s symphonic works from this time are suffused with the same folkloric quality as his songs, either in the form of a distant echo or a direct quote. In a few cases, Mahler transferred his songs in their entirety to a symphony (Urlicht, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, Es sungen Drei Engel).

Mahler’s selection of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn also reveals something about his youthful memories. He grew up in what was then the Moravian garrison city of Iglau (now Jihlava). There Mahler became familiar with soldiers playing their music while marching past the barracks. However, the ‘military’ texts found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn are far from triumphant. Revelge (‘Reveille’: ‘Ich muss mar­schieren’) is one poignant example; it deals with a fatally injured drummer boy. In Der Tamboursg’sell (‘The Drummer Boy’) a comrade-in-arms receives a death sentence for desertion. Sometimes, Mahler skilfully unites declarations of love with martial music, as in Wo die schönen Tro­mpeten blasen, but these poems have a decidedly pacifistic tone.

Each of the songs in this cycle has its own orchestra, as it were, in which different instruments come to the fore, lending each song an ever-changing colour palette. Later, Mahler would expand his use of martial rhythms and trumpet calls, and along the way, the Ländler (Rheinlegendchen), a dance of the ‘common folk’, would gradually lose its innocence. Almost everything that makes Mahler a Mahler can already be found here.

Translation: Josh Dillon

door Aad van der Ven

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Symphony No. 4

door Rolf Hermsen

Gustav Mahler felt his symphonies should embrace the world – hence their length and almost cinematic, narrative character. Yet at their core, they are versions of one and the same thing: the inner cosmos of a great composer, Mahler’s own world. Despite being the shortest, most accessible and light-hearted of his nine completed symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 in G major is nonetheless an expression of the ‘complete’ Mahler. It is a quest for meaning amid the bewildering mystery of life – often in nature, sometimes through grotesque humour and always through sensuous orchestration, with waves of clear melody crashing over and over against dark abstraction. The symphony as a whole builds towards its vocal finale, Das himmlische Leben, a folk-poetic depiction of heaven seen through the eyes of a child – a quintessentially Mahlerian blend of high and low styles, in a heaven in which even children enjoy abundantly flowing wine, and animals are as endearing as they are edible.

The sleigh bells that herald in Das himmlische Leben are heard even in the very first bars of the symphony, setting in motion a journey whose final destination is heaven and which unfolds in three stages: life, death and despair. For no other composer are mountains and valleys of such literal majesty and of such profoundly figurative importance. In the second movement, death is portrayed in a manner befitting the Fourth’s relative levity – the solo violin is tuned in scordatura to produce a piercing, shrill tone evoking this archetypal image: Freund Hain (or ‘Death the Fiddler’), who plays a danse macabre on his fiddle. As Mahler’s indication for this part of the score shows, this is death in scherzo form. The third movement unsurpassably draws the helpless listener into the depths with a truly Mahlerian adagio that is ineffably melancholic, as indefinable as it is all-encompassing. This is followed by the joy of Das himmlische Leben like a kind of redemption (but did we actually wish to be redeemed?).

Gustav Mahler felt his symphonies should embrace the world – hence their length and almost cinematic, narrative character. Yet at their core, they are versions of one and the same thing: the inner cosmos of a great composer, Mahler’s own world. Despite being the shortest, most accessible and light-hearted of his nine completed symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 in G major is nonetheless an expression of the ‘complete’ Mahler. It is a quest for meaning amid the bewildering mystery of life – often in nature, sometimes through grotesque humour and always through sensuous orchestration, with waves of clear melody crashing over and over against dark abstraction. The symphony as a whole builds towards its vocal finale, Das himmlische Leben, a folk-poetic depiction of heaven seen through the eyes of a child – a quintessentially Mahlerian blend of high and low styles, in a heaven in which even children enjoy abundantly flowing wine, and animals are as endearing as they are edible.

The sleigh bells that herald in Das himmlische Leben are heard even in the very first bars of the symphony, setting in motion a journey whose final destination is heaven and which unfolds in three stages: life, death and despair. For no other composer are mountains and valleys of such literal majesty and of such profoundly figurative importance. In the second movement, death is portrayed in a manner befitting the Fourth’s relative levity – the solo violin is tuned in scordatura to produce a piercing, shrill tone evoking this archetypal image: Freund Hain (or ‘Death the Fiddler’), who plays a danse macabre on his fiddle. As Mahler’s indication for this part of the score shows, this is death in scherzo form. The third movement unsurpassably draws the helpless listener into the depths with a truly Mahlerian adagio that is ineffably melancholic, as indefinable as it is all-encompassing. This is followed by the joy of Das himmlische Leben like a kind of redemption (but did we actually wish to be redeemed?).

  • Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

    Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

  • Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

    Voorblad van een partituur van Gustav Mahlers Vierde symfonie

    circa 1911

Owing to his duties as director of the Vienna Hofoper, Mahler composed during his summer holidays. After he completed the Third Symphony in 1896, it seemed as if his symphonic muse had fallen silent. Yet just before the end of his 1899 holiday, Mahler conceived a rough outline of the first three movements of the Fourth. It would not be until the following summer, though, that he would resume work on the symphony, completing it in just over a month, thanks in part to the fact that he had previously set Das himmlische Leben to music. Years prior, Mahler had earmarked the text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a collection of German folk poetry and an enduring source of inspiration for him – for a movement of a symphony rather than his song cycle of the same name, published in 1899, from which he had intentionally withheld it. Mahler’s work navigates the boundaries between late and post-Romanticism. Cracks start to appear in the harmonic edifice so revered by those of that generation, including Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who would later dismantle it further.

Translation: Josh Dillon

Owing to his duties as director of the Vienna Hofoper, Mahler composed during his summer holidays. After he completed the Third Symphony in 1896, it seemed as if his symphonic muse had fallen silent. Yet just before the end of his 1899 holiday, Mahler conceived a rough outline of the first three movements of the Fourth. It would not be until the following summer, though, that he would resume work on the symphony, completing it in just over a month, thanks in part to the fact that he had previously set Das himmlische Leben to music. Years prior, Mahler had earmarked the text, taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a collection of German folk poetry and an enduring source of inspiration for him – for a movement of a symphony rather than his song cycle of the same name, published in 1899, from which he had intentionally withheld it. Mahler’s work navigates the boundaries between late and post-Romanticism. Cracks start to appear in the harmonic edifice so revered by those of that generation, including Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, who would later dismantle it further.

Translation: Josh Dillon

door Rolf Hermsen

Biografie

NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo, orchestra

The NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo was founded in 1926 as the New Symphony Orchestra. In 1930, it was the first orchestra in the world to make an electric recording of a Mahler symphony: the Fourth.

It came under the financial support of Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) and was renamed the NHK Symphony Orchestra.

Today they play about 120 concerts each season. The orchestra played the Japanese premieres of Mahler’s First, Fourt hand Eighth Symphonies. Fabio Luisi has been their Chief Conductor since 2022. Other conductors who are closely associated with the NHK Symphony Orchestra include Charles Dutoit, Herbert Blomstedt, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Paavo Järvi, Tadaaki Otaka, and Tatsuya Shimono.

The NHK Symphony Orchestra performed for the first time in The Concertgebouw in the summer of 2001, along with pianist Martha Argerich. The 2025 European tour is supported by Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan and Japan Arts Council, and sponsored by ANA Holdings Inc., Iwatani Corporation, Aisin Corporation, East Japan Railway Company, Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd. and Mizuho Bank, Ltd.

Fabio Luisi, conductor

Fabio Luisi has been Chief Conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo since the 2022-2023 season. In December 2023, they performed Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.

He is also Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

The Italian-born Luisi is Music Director of the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Puglia and Honorary Conductor with both the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale RAI and the Teatro Carlo Felice in his native Genoa. Luisi studied piano at the Genoa conservatoire and conducting with Milan Horvat in Graz. As Chief Conductor of the Wiener Symphoniker, he was awarded the Anton Bruckner Ring and Medal.

His DVD of Wagner’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, recorded live from The Metropolitan Opera in New York, won a Grammy Award in 2012. Luisi regularly returns to Amsterdam as a guest conductor for the Concertgebouw Orchestra and others. He is also a passionate perfumer.

Ying Fang, soprano

Ying Fang made her Concertgebouw debut in April 2025 in Bach’s Johannes-Passion with the ensemble Pygmalion, conducted by Raphaël Pichon. She made opera debuts this season in London, Munich, Wien and San Francisco.

She appeared in the 2023-2024 season with Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, in Handel’s Agrippina and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

On the concert stage, she has sung Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the orchestras of Sydney, Chicago and San Francisco, and in the Eighth with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons. In 2009, Fang was the winner of the prestigious Golden Bell Award for Music in her native China.

The soprano received her ba­chelor’s from the conservatoire in Shanghai and her master’s from The Juilliard School in New York. She has also participated in The Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.

Matthias Goerne, baritone

Matthias Goerne is acclaimed for his profound interpretations of opera and art song. He has performed at top houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, Paris National Opera, and Vienna State Opera, in roles such as Wotan, Amfortas, Marke, Bluebeard, and Wozzeck.

He collaborates with leading conductors – Simon Rattle, Kirill Petrenko, Gustavo Dudamel, Christoph Eschenbach, Franz Welser-Möst, Herbert Blomstedt, Fabio Luisi, Manfred Honeck, Jaap van Zweden, Yannick Nézet-Séguin – and appears regularly with major orchestras and festivals. An acclaimed recording artist with numerous awards and five Grammy nominations, Matthias Goerne is a member of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Expanding his artistic scope, he will debut as stage director in Salome (Richard Strauss) in Toulouse. Recent highlights include a Schubert’s song cycle with Maria João Pires and Daniil Trifonov, performed across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia, and the world premiere of Jörg Widmann’s Schumannliebe. Born in Weimar, Matthias Goerne studied with Hans-Joachim Beyer, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.