Mahler: Symphony No. 4

Bernard Haitink conducts Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G Major The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra (BR-KLASSIK) were connected by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, which was abruptly ended by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding live recordings of concerts from recent years that have not yet been released. This recording of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony documents concerts from November 2005 in the Münchner Philharmonie in the Gasteig. Since Haitink first conducted a subscription concert in Munich in 1958, he repeatedly took the helm of the Bavarian Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra – in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz or in the Philharmonie in Gasteig. The fruitful collaboration lasted more than six decades. Orchestra musicians and singers worked with him as willingly as the sound technicians of the BR. As an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, particularly of German-Austrian late Romanticism, Haitink was highly esteemed worldwide. Gustav Mahler's symphonies were always in the best hands with him. The transparency of the sound architecture of a musical composition with its manifold interweaving was for him the highest principle: utmost tonal sensitivity combined with a clearly structured interpretation of the score. In his Fourth Symphony, Gustav Mahler brought his engagement with the poems from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" to a preliminary climax. Already in the 'Wunderhorn Symphonies' Nos. 2 and 3, texts from that collection of poems published between 1805 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim were incorporated. In his Fourth Symphony, composed between 1899 and 1901, the Wunderhorn poem 'Das himmlische Leben' now sounds in the final section, which Mahler had already set to music in 1892. It sketches, from a childlike perspective, the image of an afterlife as a land of milk and honey. Mahler's skeptical view of the world of his time sketches with this "heavenly world" a utopian counter-design.