Netherlands Symphony Orchestra

Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Jan Willem de Vriend – Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5 (2014)
DSF Stereo DSD128/5.64 MHz | Time – 56:30 minutes | 4,46 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Booklet, Front Cover |  © Challenge Records

It was only when he reached Naples in April 1831 — after almost a year of his journey — that Italy began to seep its way into Mendelssohn’s music. Naples also called a halt to the pleasures of travelling. The weather was dreadful, with continual rain, so it was better to remain indoors. Mendelssohn used his ‘free time’ for a new symphony in the vibrant key of A major, the Italian. It seems to have fl owed from his pen with consummate ease, although he was only to complete the work some two years later, in Berlin, when his journey to Paestum on the Gulf of Salerno was far in his past.

The Italian is a real party piece. This was certainly the view following the work’s premiere in London on 13 May 1833, given by the Philharmonic Society. (Mendelssohn was highly acclaimed in London, where he had been commissioned to produce a new symphony). This makes it all the more remarkable that Mendelssohn himself described this masterpiece as having been ‘one of the most bitter moments of my entire career’, fretting, for years to come, about whether he ought to rewrite the second, third and fourth movements.

The opening Allegro vivace abounds with Mediterranean exuberance. The slow movement probably depicts a religious procession, witnessed by the composer in Naples. The third movement — Con moto moderato — seems to have little in the way of Italian infl uence. Rather one might imagine oneself in the shade of Germanic limes, beech and pine trees, Biedermeier-style. But the fi nale is drawn directly from Italian folk life: an irresistible, whirling dance to the rhythmic beat of the saltarello.

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Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Jan Willem de Vriend – Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 (2014)
DSF Stereo DSD128/5.64 MHz | Time – 01:09:43 minutes | 5,5 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Booklet, Front Cover |  © Challenge Records

“What is particularly amazing about the Mendelssohn symphonies is the fact that he is both harking back to old masters like Bach, and, as a child of his time, looking ahead. Especially his Italian and Scottish symphonies are pointing at the future, since, in my opinion, Mendelssohn lived in the era of discovery, of the Wanderer. Goethe came up with his young Werther, a guy who went away to discover the world and upon returning nothing looked the same. It’s a bit like the Wanderer in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich: the sea, the valley, the hills, the light — everything looked new, fresh and different. Mendelssohn was such a Wanderer. He had read Goethe, so he travelled a lot. He went to Scotland, Italy and England where he absorbed the newness of it all. And that is exactly what you can hear in his music: astonishment, translated into music using harmonies we knew but which in his hands sounded completely fresh and new. Having said that, you can also hear an old-school musical approach. Mendelssohn sometimes uses fugues or chorales we know from older styles. He was the first to bring back those trustworthy techniques — and that, in itself, was also new. He took those techniques on a journey and that i that his music isn’t being played more often. There are Beethoven, Brahms or Schumann programs all over the place, but where is Mendelssohn? Let me repeat: where is Mendelssohn?”

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Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Jan Willem de Vriend – Mahler: Symphony No. 1 ‘Titan’ (2010)
DSF Stereo DSD128/5.64 MHz | Time – 56:24 minutes | 4,44 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Booklet, Front Cover |  © Challenge Records

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was just twenty-four and engaged with the Royal and Imperial Theater of Kassel, Germany, as its music director, when he fell in love with one of its sopranos, the young and beautiful Johanna Richter. She so much steered up his feelings that he dedicated his 1884 song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen to her. Four years later, in 1888, another lady infatuated him, but this time she had four children and was married to the grandson of the famous composer Carl Maria von Weber. Moreover, she was the wife of the man who had furnished Mahler with Carl Maria’s unfinished sketches for a comic opera, which led to Die drei Pintos, a mix of Mahler’s own inspirations and rearrangements. On 20 January 1888 the opera was premiered at the Neues Stadttheater in Leipzig with its Kapellmeister Mahler conducting. That same month he started composing his Symphonische Dichtung in Zwei Abtheilungen (Symphonic Poem in Two Parts), later his First Symphony, and finished it in March. Mahler, already the very successful music director of the Hungarian National Opera, conducted the first performance of the work in Budapest on 20 November 1889. It got a cool if not hostile reception, mainly because of the ‘bizarre, vulgar and cacophonic extravaganza’s’ of the last two movements. At least this was how it was felt, with the public and the critics in bewilderment especially after the finale’s unsurpassed ferocity. The final chords were followed by utter silence, until a few members of the audience hesitantly began to applaud, quickly interspersed with demonstrative sounds of disapproval. Mahler left the hall in devastation, roaming through the dark streets, like an ‘outcast’. A few years later he would write to Alma Schindler: “Sometimes it sent shivers down my spine. Damn it all, where do people keep their ears and hearts if they cannot hear that!”

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