Gustav Mahler went to some lengths to avoid the ‘curse of the Ninth Symphony’. On completing that work, which today is regarded, with a degree of exaggeration, as a musical epitaph, he threw himself into composing his next (tenth) symphony, which unfortunately was left mainly in the form of sketches. During this concert, we will hear the two movements of the unfinished composition on which Mahler’s work is considered to have been most advanced: the monumental and moving Adagio and the third movement, Purgatorio. Both were edited after Mahler’s death by the composer’s friend, the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg.
The ubiquitous cosmic inspirations in the output of Charles Koechlin resulted from his unfulfilled dream of becoming an astronomer. His impressionistic nocturne Vers la voûte étoilée was written after the death of the famous populariser of cosmology Camille Flammarion. It is hard to believe that this wonderful musical observation of a ‘starry sky’ was not given its first performance until 1989, almost forty years after the composer’s death.
Due to the surprising technical demands of Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major, it was caustically dubbed a ‘concerto against the violin’. Despite that, the famous violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, who took part in the work’s first performance, numbered it among the four great German violin concertos of the Romantic era.
Bartłomiej Gembicki
