DAS LIED ERDE

This recording features the rare version of this score with baritone replacing the mezzo-soprano. Sony Music have released this CD to mark the company’s centenary. Review: "Nagano brings to the listener the full depth and breadth to this lapidary score in which the realism of nature and the outdoors speaks with forceful impact from the concert platform." The story goes that Mahler did not dare to call Das Lied von der Erde a symphony, for fear that being his Ninth it would also be his last as it was also for Beethoven and Bruckner. Even so, he entitled it: “Symphony for tenor, contralto (or baritone) and orchestra” but did not call it “Symphony No. 9”. It is this seemingly hybrid form that makes Das Lied the epitome of Mahler’s two poles: song and symphony. The hybrid form drew from him some of his most masterful music as it did with Richard Strauss some forty years later in Vier letzte Lieder. What are those qualities, those ‘basic elements’ of Mahler’s sound-world that cap