Recorded live at the Lucerne Festival, 19 August 2007 KKL Luzern, 19 August 2007 Lucerne Festival Orchestra Women of the Arnold Schönberg Choir, Vienna Tölz Boys Choir Anna Larsson - contralto PART I / 0:50 I. Kräftig, Entschieden (34:06) PART II 34:00 II. Tempi di Menuetto. Sehr mäßig (8:20) 43:26 III. Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast (16:25) 59:44 IV. Sehr langsam. Misterioso. Durchaus ppp (9:19) "O Mensch! Gib Acht!" Text by Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra 1:09:14 V. Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck (4:24) "Es sungen drei Engel einen süßen Gesang" Text: Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1:13:37 VI. Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden (23:41) *** "Blissful trust" Those who were able to be there in person are unlikely ever to forget the occasion. Whenever Claudia Abbado conducts Mahler, especially when he is at the head of his own Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the whole is more than just the sum of its parts thanks to a process that one is tempted to call magical. The present live recording of an acclaimed performance of Mahler's Third Symphony at Lucerne's Culture and Convention Centre on 19 August 2007 provides lasting proof of this and allows us to see that with Abbado ecstasy is never achieved at the expense of musical and rhetorical clarity: a powerful emotional charge is held in check by calm contemplation. Never for a moment does Abbado give undue emphasis to subjective mawkishness or an overtly theatrical sense of worldweariness: Abbado's Mahler is precisely calculated and at the same time intuitively felt. The musicians of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra were meeting for the Orth time when they assembled in Lucerne in the summer of 2007. Among them were not only a number of distinguished soloists but also experienced principals from the world's foremost orchestras: the leaders were Kolja Blacher and Sebastian Breuninger, while the rank-and-file violin sec-tion behind them included players of the eminence of Mirijam Contzen and llya Gringolts. The cellos ware led by Jens Peter Maintz and Natalia Gutman sitting alongside Valentin Erben of the Alban Berg Quartett and Clemens Hagen, whose sister, Veronika, was a member of the viola section under Wolfram Christ and Diemut Poppen. The woodwind section in-cluded the flautist Jacques Zoon and the ciarinettist Sabine Meyer, while prominent among the brass was the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich. All the plavers are friendly with one another es weil as sharing a special affinity for chamber music, which famously makes the greatest demands in terms ofthe need to listen closely to one's colleagues. And it is here thatthis orchestra is unique, a uniqueness clear from the present performance. The large concert hell seerned literally to vibrate with psychic energy, and the intensity with which the musicians responded to even the tiniest fluctuations in the music reached the point where all the players seemed to surpass themselves. "The goal is clear and is shared by all the participants," wrote the critic ofthe Neue ZürcherZeitung; "it seems that in advancing towards this goal, the players achieve a high degree of individual responsibility, while the conductor encourages each and every one ofthem ... to realize his or her potential in orderto benefitthe collective— an example of successful leadership in a highly specialized context. As such, this is more or less the opposite of what people normally assume to be the job of a conductor. What we saw here was emphatically not self-promotion ata stroke butthe experience that something special arises only when people have space in which to develop." Abbado first recorded Mahler's Third Symphony in 1980, following it up with a second recording in 1999, both of them demonstrating the conductor's particular affinity with the work. His unerring feel tor the narrative structures of this rich and varied score finds expression in an extraordinary sensitivity, aliowing hirn to respond with particular vividnessto a workthat deals with nothing lass than the origins ofthe universe. [...]

• published: 10 Feb 2015
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