Gustav Mahler Festival Symphonic concert
In June, our Orchestra will participate as a guest at an important event marking the end of the Krakow Philharmonic's 80th anniversary season - the Gustav Mahler Festival, a project whose first edition in 2011 coincided with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the death of its patron, Gustav Mahler, one of the greatest symphonists in the history of music. The second instalment of the event, organised after 14 years, will be a presentation of Mahler's complete symphonies - from the First to the Ninth, with a spectacular culmination of the festival in the form of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in E-flat Major, known as the Symphony of a Thousand.
Symphony No. 2 in C minor (our Orchestra participated in its performance in April of this year), which premiered in 1895, began a new chapter in Gustav Mahler’s oeuvre, returning to Beethoven's concept of the symphony with a vocal finale, a concept he also used in his next two works in the genre - each time very differently. While the Second and Fourth use fairly traditional four-part architectonics, the Third (presented to the public in 1902, six years after its completion) has a more complex structure. It is six-episode, with the monumental first part (an apotheosis of the beauty and power of nature) serving as a kind of "introduction" to the five that follow, forming a balancing cycle. According to the programme suggested by the composer (albeit unofficially), starting from the fourth movement, vocal means are introduced into the symphony: an orchestral song and choral sections to texts by Nietzsche and a collection of German folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn particularly beloved by Mahler. The complexity of the structure, the multithreaded nature of the programmatic concepts caused the initial reserve of critics towards the work, appreciated only with time, through the prism of subsequent, achievements of the great composer. Although the Eighth, which concludes the Festival, requires an even larger performance apparatus, it is the Third that is the largest in size in Mahler's legacy and is among those works that fill out the concert evening's program on their own. The dazzling symphonic fresco contemplating the universe of nature and human fate can be heard - due to the scale of difficulty - less frequently than Mahler's other symphonies, and that's one reason why it's worth going to the June concert.
Another is the plethora of performers, which will include altoist Małgorzata Pańko-Edery applauded in many roles at the Grand Theatre - National Opera and on numerous other Polish and foreign stages, excellent choirs, and the evening will be conducted by Gabor Hollerung, Hungarian symphonic conductor and choirmaster, music director of the Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra, chief conductor of the Budapest Academic Choral Society, artistic director of the Zemplén Festival and founder and artistic director of the Budapest International Choral Competition. He specialises in the great symphonic and oratorio repertoire having, among other things, many acclaimed recordings.
