Lucerne Festival Orchestra 4 by Mahler, st 17 aug 2022, Od (2022/2022), Dirigent Riccardo Chailly

The Songs of a Journeyman are Gustav Mahler's earliest masterpiece. He composed it in 1884/85 when he was unhappily in love with the soprano Johanna Richter, and this experience, but also his dream of a "beautiful world" characterize the verses he wrote himself and the music. The cycle will be performed by the young South Tyrolean baritone Andrè Schuen, who causes a sensation as an opera star and is at the same time a first-class interpreter of lieder. A little later, Mahler also quoted the Gesellen-Lieder in his First Symphony, which collaged very heterogeneous sound spheres and provided the model for a “diverse” work of art. The music should sound “like a natural sound” is the playing instruction for the first movement, which plays with the alienated cuckoo call. In the symphony, Mahler also uses folk music echoes of the Ländler and the waltz. In the third movement, he presents the canon Frère Jacques as a funeral march in a ghastly minor variant – and counteracts this "funeral" with the "merriment and banality of an interfering Bohemian band of musicians". A sound experience!