The Mahler Players returned in mid-September 2014 for their second outing of that year, featuring performances of works by three musical giants of the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was composed as a birthday present for his wife, and first performed in private on Christmas morning 1870 as she awoke. Incorporating several motifs from his mammoth Ring Cycle, this music – one of the very few non-operatic works Wagner wrote – shows him at his most intimate. Schoenberg, a composer who worshipped both Wagner and Mahler, composed his Five Orchestral Pieces over one hundred years ago in 1909, but they still have the power to shock today. The music is alternately unsettling, terrifying, passionate, and in places extremely beautiful, such as the ethereal ‘Summer Morning by the Lake’. The work was performed in a chamber arrangement by one of Schoenberg’s pupils, approved by the composer himself. The nine songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German folk poems and tales, contain some of Mahler’s least well-known but also most accessible and immediately attractive works. Covering a range of subjects including youthful flirtation, a nonsense singing contest between a nightingale and a cuckoo, a ghostly march of soldiers condemned to die in war and the satirical ‘St Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes’. The songs performed also included Urlicht, better known as the fourth movement of the monumental Second Symphony. The reduced orchestrations, which received their Scottish premieres in these performances, are by Klaus Simon.
