Mahler: Symphony 3, Finale - transcribed and played by David Briggs at St John the Divine, New York скачать в хорошем качестве

Mahler: Symphony 3, Finale - transcribed and played by David Briggs at St John the Divine, New York

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No 3, Finale (‘What love tells me’), transcribed and performed by David Briggs at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York My own love affair with the Symphonies of Gustav Mahler began when I was a 15-year old Viola player in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. We performed the Fifth with the late great Sir Charles Groves and the experience changed my life forever. I became so smitten with this music that I could hardly sleep. In 1996 I had the idea of transcribing Mahler 5 for the organ, and gave the premiere (in a baking heatwave!) during the 1998 Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester. Later I transcribed the Sixth (2006), the Third (2010), the Second (2012), the Eighth (2015) and the Fourth (2017). People sometimes ask, ‘why do you transcribe these symphonies for the organ?’. The answer is actually quite simple - just out of deep and very longstanding love of the raw essence of the music. Mr Mahler only wrote for the organ twice, and very much as part of the orchestra (in the 2nd and 8th symphonies). I hope that, with the colossal development of of the instrument during the twentieth century, and the ability of control a veritable myriad of color at the push of a piston, he might approve. Of course, the result isn’t the same as the orchestra - and the truth is (I believe) that you loose some things and gain others. But I hope you will enjoy here the ravishingly beautiful final movement of the Third - it works amazingly in a huge acoustic, like we have here at St John the Divine. I think it’s even more overwhelming in a huge space, especially with the organ’s innate ability to sustain crescendi and seamlessly build emotion, through Mahler’s colossal climaxes. Mahler began composing his Third Symphony in the summer of 1895, at his Austrian summer retreat in the Salzkammergut. Mahler had been principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera since 1891, and came to find the summer breaks from the opera house his principal opportunity for composition. In the first summer of composition in 1895 Mahler found his new symphony metamorphosing from his original intentions into a work of immense proportions. As with a number of his other symphonies Mahler concludes with a slow movement, here representing spiritual love. The original subtitle for the movement was “What love tells me”. In his opening melody, Mahler invites association with the slow movement of Beethoven’s last quartet, Opus 135. Soon, though, the music is caught in “motion, change, flux,” and before the final triumph it encounters again the catastrophe which had interrupted the first movement. an hour earlier. The adagio’s original title, “What Love Tells Me”, refers to Christian love, to agape, and Mahler’s drafts carry the superscription: “Behold my wounds! Let not one soul be lost!” The performance directions, too, speak to the issue of spirituality, for Mahler indicates that the immense final bars with their thundering kettledrum be played “not with brute strength, [but] with rich, noble tone,” and that the last measure “not be cut off sharply”—so that there is some softness to the edge between sound and silence.