CARNEGIE HALL

The MET Orchestra

Mahler - Blumine
Sibelius - Violin Concerto
Mahler - Kindertotenlieder
Sibelius - Symphony No. 7

Esa-Pekka Salonen - Conductor

Christian Tetzlaff - Violin
Anne Sofie von Otter - Mezzo-Soprano

"Mahler and Sibelius drew inspiration from nature, and the myths and poetry of their homelands. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is a melancholy but piercingly beautiful song cycle set to texts by Friedrich Rückert. There are brooding qualities in Sibelius’s innovative one-movement Symphony No. 7, but the work also boasts elemental power and stunning orchestration. The power of his Violin Concerto is derived from the tremendous technical demands made of the soloist. From its opening measures, the soloist is engaged, playing the opening theme and one of the most stunning cadenzas in all of music."

GUSTAV MAHLER  Blumine

Blumine began its life as a movement of Mahler’s now-lost suite of incidental music Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, which the composer wrote for a dramatic poem by Joseph Victor von Scheffel; it was later repurposed as the second movement of his Symphony No. 1 before being jettisoned during a subsequent revision. Blumine was only rediscovered in 1966, and has since begun receiving occasional performances as a stand-alone concert piece.

JEAN SIBELIUS  Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47

The shimmering, mysterious opening of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto marks the beginning of the new symphonic world the Finnish composer was to continue exploring the rest of his career. Composed concurrently with the Valse triste and just after the Second Symphony—in which Sibelius made dramatic formal and expressive advances over his traditional, late-Romantic First—the Violin Concerto features the same combination of warm lyricism and icy grandeur that came to characterize Sibelius’s mature works.

GUSTAV MAHLER  Kindertotenlieder 

In Mahler’s life and work, superstition and premonition are striking and abundant, as is the composer’s preoccupation with death. This ever-present sense of mortality is made painfully explicit in the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), and, sadly, the songs would also eventually come to be revealed as tragic premonitions of the composer’s own grief. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Kindertotenlieder is their tranquility: The songs capture not the hysterical panic and agony of the initial loss, but the constant struggle against the paralyzing undertow that follows, always threatening new submersions in grief.

JEAN SIBELIUS  Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 105

Especially influential to contemporary music composition is Sibelius’s ability to build epic structures from tiny motifs, a technique that began with Beethoven but reached an apotheosis in Sibelius’s final symphony, the Seventh. In this single-movement symphony, everything evolves from a few thematic scraps, building through what musicologists view as hidden fragments of traditional symphonic form toward a final upward sweep. The hymn-like motifs, shivering strings, ambiguous wind chords, and ephemeral dances sound like procedures from earlier Sibelius symphonies that have been miraculously distilled.