Description
Mahler 5
Tears and Ecstasy
Richard Strauss and Mahler make a pair in this concert featuring one of Mahler’s most popular symphonies – the one with the heartbreakingly beautiful Adagietto for strings and harp. Ashkenazy says it’s not just interesting but right to play the music of Richard Strauss alongside Mahler. They could have been rivals, but were friends, even though musically, as Mahler put it, they were like miners, tunnelling from opposite sides and “meeting on their subterranean ways”.
From one side this concert unearths the overture from Strauss’s first opera and strikes a seam of witty allusion in the virtuoso Burleske for piano and orchestra. From the other side comes Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, making its way from the sombre tread of a funeral march to the ecstasy of its finale. But our hearts are won by the musical declaration of love embraced by these two extremes: the Symphony’s Adagietto, in which strings and harp give voice to a wordless passion.
Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Clemens Leske piano
Venue: Concert Hall
Dates: 20 – 22 May
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