Prague Spring: Opening Concert

“A birthday present for the Prague Spring,” was how the festival director Roman Bělor responded to news of the exclusive guest appearance of the Berliner Philharmoniker, which will perform with its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko at the extraordinary opening concert of the festival’s 75th jubilee. Furthermore, the world-leading orchestra will present a programme consisting of the works of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) – a repertoire that it has mastered with absolute conviction.

Programme: – Gustav Mahler: Rückert-Lieder – Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major

Mahler started composing his Rückert-Lieder (Songs to Words by Friedrich Rückert) in 1901. He completed four of the five songs in August, adding the fifth – “Liebst du um Schönheit” – a year later as a wedding gift for his young wife Alma Schindler. Mahler allegedly hid his only true love song in the vocal score of Wagner’s opera Siegfried and then waited several days until Alma discovered it. The audience can enjoy this endearing declaration of love as interpreted by one of the most sought-after mezzo-sopranos of our time, Elisabeth Kulman.

The second half of the evening will see the interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, a work that differs significantly from the composer’s preceding oeuvre. The lighter instrumentation, the absence of the grandeur and meditativeness of the previous symphonies met with misapprehension during the composition’s premiere in the winter of 1901, both from the public and from the critics. The work was deemed “incomprehensible and without programme”, and Mahler was even accused of making fun of his audience. In actual fact, his Fourth was a deliberate departure from the programme symphony concept, which may have been brought about by the desire to differ from his contemporaries. Mahler also offered new, more “chamber-like” quality of sound, to which he returned on several later occasions. All the same, he included a song from The Boy’s Magic Horn in the final movement of the symphony – like in his second and third ones. The soprano part will be rendered by the superb Christiane Karg.