“Grandiose, unaffected, expansive, majestic, immovable…” – Christian Thielemann’s description of Anton Bruckner’s music vividly captures its essence and uniqueness. And he himself captures the soul of the great romantic composer in his interpretation of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic. Recorded live at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden on 14 November 2006, the concert also features three orchestral preludes from the opera “Palestrina” by another late-romantic composer, Hans Pfitzner (A05512085 / Length: 25′)
Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem op.45
Johannes Brahms composed his Requiem in 1865/66, shortly after the death of his mother. A profoundly moving work for soprano and baritone solo, chorus and orchestra, it is the composer’s largest single composition. No work did more to win Brahms international recognition and, after the first complete performance of the Requiem in Leipzig in 1869, he was regarded as one of the leading composers of his time. It was not the first requiem in German, but the first in which a composer pieced together his text from Bible passages in Martin Luther’s German translation. It is an intensely personal selection, which speaks to the living and seeks to offer hope and comfort. Through his subtle, almost surreal, affinity to Brahms’ unorthodox, elusive worldview, conductor Christian Thielemann has crafted a performance that places him among the best interpreters of this work, such as Maazel, Furtwängler, Karajan, Klemperer.
Alice in Wonderland
Ravel, Handel, Elgar, Stravinsky, a snippet of Puccini’s ‘Turandot,’ a bassclarinet homage to George Gershwin, glissandi, hints of musicals, film music and Gilbert & Sullivan – Unsuk Chin is a master of stylistic parody, but also much more than that: she is clearly at home on every highway and byway of music history. Yet the musical house she constructs with the building blocks of the past and the present is definitely her own house, which she has designed and which self-assuredly proclaims her unmistakable individuality and style. Director Achim Freyer, whose productions have been setting standards for decades, sees Chin’s opera as a collection of ‘dream sequences,’ for which he has created imaginary spaces: with the help of pulleys, acrobats depict the magical characters of Alice’s world and suggest the action through pantomime, and with the help of colorful masks and props.