In "one of the mightiest shouts of human aspiration ever made in music," is this the most beautiful music ever? Or this? Or this?

Or, "FOUND" FREE MUSIC (SAMPLES), Part 2

In Part 1, we enjoyed Seattle Chamber Music Society's gift of the 1st movement of Schubert's String Quintet (plus bonus music). The unconscionably delayed Part 2 is inspired by a free video preview offered by the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall of the orchestra's January 2026 performances, under Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko, of a work described by Deryck Cooke as "one of the mightiest shouts of human aspiration ever made in music," which the Philharmoniker hadn't played since opening night of the 2011-12 season, Sept. 18, 2011. -- Ed.

UPDATE: A new block of performances added from a special source
2nd UPDATE (Monday): Coming up next (at the end)
3rd UPDATE (later Monday): Semyon Bychkov on Mahler 8

There's a snatch on YouTube from that 2011 Berlin Phil performance under then-Chief Conductor Simon Rattle

[2:34] "Accende lumen sensibus" ("Kindle our senses with light")
[Eventually we're going to hear a little more of this performance.]

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD YOU ALREADY RECOGNIZE THE PIECE.
(IF NOT, WILL THIS LONGER EXCERPT GIVE IT AWAY?)

I've chosen an unusual start point. It just happens that this strategic moment is one of the most beautiful musical moments I know. Yes, yes, I say that, or words to that effect, a lot here. Why, it came up in Part 1 of this post, in the cases of both the first and the second movements of the Schubert C major String Quintet. In my defense, I would point out that since I'm in charge of the Sunday Classics program, and I get to choose all the music, an awful lot of it is music that's especially close to my heart.

Let's start by just listening through this little chunk I've carved out. -- Ed.

"Imple superna gratia, gratia, quae tu creasti pectora"
("Fill with heavenly grace, grace, the breasts that thou created")

[4:10] Joyce Barker & Agnes Giebel (s), Kerstin Meyer (ms), Helen Watts (c), Kenneth Neate (t), Alfred Orda (b), Arnold van Mill (bs); Charles Spinks, organ; BBC Chorus, BBC Choral Society, Goldsmith's Choral Union, Hamp­stead Choral Society, Emanuel School Boys' Choir, Orpington Junior Sing­ers, "much-augmented" London Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Hor­en­stein, cond. Live performance from the Royal Albert Hall, Mar. 20, 1959

by Ken

In this case, the sheer beauty of the musical moment seems to me to have a crucial structural purpose, which is why I've made this seriously varied assortment of performance clips. And they really are very different -- in pacing, obviously (I've arranged them in "length" order, but performances that are closest in length may be the most different in everything else -- flow, tone(s), color(s), emphasis. Some of them may be barely recognizable as the same music. In each case, though, I encourage you to take note of how your experience is affected by the first voice we hear -- and to a lesser extent the second, and then the third, fourth, and fifth, who enter together. But especially the first, who not only introduces this melody but throughout the movement we're sampling will be sailing and soaring over the musical staff and over the ensemble.

If there's one thing our composer knew, it was voices. He spent the major part of his career in the pit of opera houses. But that didn't incline him to make life easy for singers when he wrote for them. It's more that he had ideas about how he could stretch those voices. In this case, for his top voice, the first soprano, he understood that coming in un-warmed-up she couldn't be asked to leap straight to high B-flats and Cs, and at first asked her only to show great fluidity and tonal sheen and be able to sustain crucial high A-flats. But gradually he worked in the B-flats and, yes, a couple of sustained high Cs.

Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work

"Mahler's way of thinking in music did not easily conform to the rules of the symphonic scholars. He could not contain himself in the A B A divisions of symphonic form. In this unique first movement he adapted large-scale sonata form to his own power of improvisation. He believed that music should continually grow, phrase by phrase, one section balancing another, by laws not only of musical form as usually obeyed but also by psychological and organic growth and the logic of contrast. . . ."

-- Neville Cardus, in his "Appreciation of Mahler's Third"
[reproduced in part in the last post in this Mahler 3 series]

"This final published version [of the Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony] is clearly both tauter and richer, for there is less repetition and more diversity, and Brahms has cast fresh light on his themes by bringing them into new relationships. Altogether these changes provide a deeply fascinating insight into genius at work."

-- Robert Pascall, vice chair of the New Complete Brahms Edition (and editor of the symphonies), in his notes for the Mackerras-Teldec Brahms 1

REMEMBER THE VERY DIFFERENT VERSIONS WE'VE
HEARD OF THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO OF BRAHMS 1?

BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto

► A reconstruction of the "initial performing version":

► And this: the familiar published (i.e., final) version
(which we'll be hearing -- and thinking about -- a lot more!):

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, January 1997

WE'LL TALK ABOUT THEM, BUT FOR NOW MIGHT WE HAVE
MAESTRO M. PLAY US ANOTHER SYMPHONIC ANDANTE?

BBC Philharmonic, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. BBC Music Magazine, recorded live in Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (England), Nov. 16, 2002 (published 2005)

by Ken

It's taken us a long time and a crazy path to get here, "here" being out-the-other-end of the first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony --

OUR CRAZY PATH TO WHEREVER WE ARE NOW:

► "Setting out to trace the lineage of Boston Symphony concert-masters back to 1962, we wind up trapped in the gigantic first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony," July 23

► "Coming momentarily (if not sooner): An adventure in musical metamorphosis -- presented in a pair of mutually accessible parts," Sept. 22

► "Part 1: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind!," Sept 23

► "Part 2: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind! (Then again, are we so sure?)," Sept. 27

► "Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work," today

BECAUSE THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO IS SO DEAR TO ME,
THE SC ARCHIVE TEEMS WITH PERFORMANCES OF IT

While we've got another whole group of recordings coming up in this post, for immediate hearing I've plucked out two, from the Brahms symphony cycles I feel closest to, returning to them regularly with tingly expectation that's always rewarded. Kurt Masur's Andante sostenuto and Kurt Sanderling's are different; notably, though Masur sounds in no way rushed, Sanderling sets a still-more-spacious pace, which the Dresden players fill with glowing life. But both draw me back above all because the orchestras have achieved real identification with the music, playing not just with heart-enriching beauty and finesse but with a soul-stirring sense of really living the music, whether in melodic or accompanimental or ensemble writing -- all of it sounded and made to fit together with such fullness and depth and general "rightness" of expression.

(It sobers me to realize that I've been loving the Sandering-Dresden Brahms cycle for something like half a century now, especially enjoying, in the early decades, those beautiful Eurodisc LP pressings.)

Brooding and striving, grand and intimate, it's Bruch's "Scottish Fantasy"

by Ken

In Friday night's preview we revisited Beethoven's Choral Fantasy (for piano, soloists, chorus, and orchestra) and Liszt's Hungarian Fantasia (for piano and orchestra) in anticipation of turning our attention today to Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra.

With this installment we have concluded our survey of the three works of Bruch known to most music lovers. We heard the soulful Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra ("A haunting little piece that tells us less than we would think about its composer's roots") and the great First Violin Concerto in G minor ("From brooding depths to sparkling heights") in April.

THE SCOTTISH FANTASY WAS COMPOSED IN 1879-80 . . .

Parting, though not without a struggle -- with "an increasingly calm acceptance of fate"

A symphonic finale in search of an ending

In the first not-quite-six minutes or so of this clip, Lenny B's comments are superimposed over a rehearsal, which gives way to the actual performance at about 5:55. We first saw this clip in the January 2012 post "At how bad a point did the cell-phone ring heard 'round the world interrupt the NY Phil's Mahler Ninth? Let's complete the symphony." (We also heard Lenny conducting the complete finale from a July 1979 Tanglewood performance with the Boston Symphony. Later we're going to hear the broadest of his recordings of the movement.)

by Ken

Well, when we attacked "Der Abschied" ("The Farewell"), the half-hour sixth and final song of the song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth (in a July 2009 Maureen Forrester remembrance post), we pretty much just plunged in (in August 2010 we followed up with the three tenor songs), and I'm afraid that's what we're going to do as well with the other completed work composed after Mahler's diagnosis of terminal heart disease, the Ninth Symphony.

I noted when we listened to Mahler's "most characteristic" and "least loved" symphony, the Seventh (in November -- first the three middle movements, then the outer movements), that the composer would use this basic plan again. In the Seventh it's a pair of enormous outer movements bracketing a core of "other" musics: the two "Night Music"s wrapped around a scherzo. This is very much the plan of the unfinished Tenth Symphony, with a core consisting of a pair of scherzos bracketing the little "Purgatorio" movement (we heard this core of the Tenth later in November) -- with the crucial difference that those gigantic outer movements are now slow rather than normal symphonic fast ones.

That switch, of course, had already been made in the Ninth Symphony (which, as I noted in Friday night's preview, should properly have been the Tenth, if Mahler had had the courage to tempt fate and give Das Lied the dangerous-for-symphony-composers number nine). It's hard to think of words to convey the scale and dimension of the opening Andante commodo and concluding Adago of the Ninth.


AS I MENTIONED IN FRIDAY NIGHT'S PREVIEW . . .

Most listeners are likely to agree that the prevailing subject matter of the Mahler Ninth is farewell, the final parting -- as we can surely divine from the clip we've seen again up top, with Leonard Bernstein providing voice-over commentary over the final 10½ minutes of the finale. But even in those majestic outer movements the tone is hardly singlemindedly elegiac, and in those "otherish" middle movements the parting journey covers some very different ground.

Mahler Symphony No. 8, "Veni, Creator Spiritus"

If you can bear the video mis-sync, here's the first 8 minutes of Part I of Mahler's monumental Symphony No. 8, his setting of the medieval hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus," with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (and soloists and choruses too numerous to mention -- even if I knew who they were) at the 2002 Proms.

by Ken

As I noted in Friday night's preview, there is an unmistakable rupture between Mahler's Eighth Symphony (which has been saddled with the unfortunate rubric "Symphony of a Thousand"; yes, it calls for eight vocal soloists and a double chorus plus children's chorus in addition to orchestra reinforced by organ, but that's a long from a thousand performers) and the song-symphony that followed, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). As everyone surely knows by now, in the interim the composer received the dire diagnosis of his untreatable heart disease.

In the Eighth Symphony, however, we find Mahler from the very outset still at his heaven-stormingest, as we heard in the video clip above.

Performances of the Mahler Eighth were once rare events. By now they have become, if not quite commonplace, then hardly rarities, and recordings . . . well, they have become more or less commonplace. Which makes this once-hardly-approachable work much more readily available, but still hardly easy of approach.

We're going to limit ourselves to Part I of the symphony, Mahler's setting of the medieval hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus." (Part II, which last more than twice as long, is a setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust.)

Preview: Before and after -- Mahler learns that he's dying

by Ken

We've actually heard the music we're going to hear (again) in tonight's preview -- an an August 2010 poat called "In the opening vision of Mahler's "Song of the Earth": "Dark is life, is death", which focused on the three tenor songs -- Nos. 1, 3, and 5 -- from Das Lied von der Erde, the work that Mahler undertook following his diagnosis of untreatable heart disease. It seemed obvious to begin by hearing the way his preceding work work, the Eighth Symphony, had closed, with the conclusion of Goethe's Faust. (FYI: This excerpt begins very softly. It gets louder.)

MAHLER: Symphony No. 8 in E-flat: conclusion, "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"

All things transitory are but parable;
here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
here the indescribable is accomplished;
the ever-womanly draws us heavenward.
[much repeated]

-- English translation by Peggie Cochrane

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. BBC Legends, live performance from the Royal Albert Hall, March 20, 1959 (6:39)

CONTRAST THAT WITH THE START OF DAS LIED

Preview: A peek at the "fifth" Rachmaninoff piano concerto

Paganini started it all, with the theme that every composer wanted to write variations on -- as if Paganini (1782-1840) hadn't already done it himself in the 24th Caprice for solo violin. We've got a proper violin performance below, but here guitarist Eliot Fisk plays his own transcription.

by Ken

Last night we sampled the second of Sergei Rachmaninoff's four piano concertos, in anticipation of our look tomorrow at the entire piece. In addition to the four formal concertos, Rachmaninoff's piano-and-orchestra output includes a remarkable set of variations, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, on "the" Paganini tune. It's one of his most inspired and loved creations, and I don't know of any better way to illustrate the richness of his imagination than to make a tactical leap from the early variations to the most famous of them, the 18th (of 21).

To go back to the beginning, here's what Paganini actually wrote, as played by the young Itzhak Perlman.

PAGANINI: Caprice No. 24 in A minor


Itzhak Perlman, violin. RCA/BMG, recorded March 1965