The Philadelphia Orchestra
Performers
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music and Artistic Director
Karen Cargill, Mezzo-Soprano
Program
A. MAHLER Select Songs (arr. David and Colin Matthews)
G. MAHLER Symphony No. 7
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating before intermission.At a Glance
Tonight’s concert presents works by Alma and Gustav Mahler, who had a legendary and tumultuous marriage.
Alma Schindler—her name when she wrote the songs that open the program—composed most of her pieces as a teenager, before she married Mahler when she was 22. He demanded that she give up composing to concentrate on the marriage and his career. We hear the first four of her Fünf Lieder in orchestrations by Colin and David Matthews.
Mahler began composing his Seventh Symphony during the unusually productive summer of 1904, just after completing his Sixth. He started with the evocative “Night Music” movements, eventually the second and fourth of the five-movement piece, but found himself creatively blocked when he tried to pick up the thread the following summer. Inspired by the sound of the oars of a boat, he eventually found a solution that allowed him to write the remaining three movements.
The Seventh, the last of Mahler’s trilogy of purely instrumental middle-period symphonies, has long been considered one of his most poetic, but also elusive, compositions. Unlike the overt programs and scattered clues that he provided for most of his earlier symphonies, Mahler said little about this fascinating piece, leaving a wide range of interpretations open to performers and audiences alike.