MythenEnsembleOrchestral - Mahler: Vierte Symphonie / Schnabel: Lieder aus, Op. 11 & 14 (Kammerfassungen) (2020)

With a remastering by artistic recording director Frédéric Angleraux, the young label Schweizer Fonogramm presents another chamber version for (only) 14 instruments of a Mahler symphony, after the 'Titänli' with the Fourth. The Swiss conductor Graziella Contratto will again be in charge. The MythenEnsembleOrchestral, also based in Switzerland and nominated for the ICMA 2020, reflects the 'double as if' (Adorno) of this seemingly classical, even childlike music with a touching mixture of transparency and transcendence. In addition to a wind quintet and a string quintet, the instruments piano, percussion and accordion, set by arranger Klaus Simon, add a completely new note to the sound - the intensity of the sound and the almost figurative soloists* will take the listener to the Grimmschen Märchenland, then again in a rollicking children's parade or want to embrace the world in Mahlerian manner, only to finally float off into other spheres with Rachel Harnisch in the finale of 'Heavenly Life'. The songs composed by the world-famous pianist and pedagogue Artur Schnabel for his later wife Therese Behr - Schnabel were written around 1900, like Mahler's Fourth, but in Graziella Contratto's arrangement one hears that modernism has already arrived here and psychological themes will gradually displace the Wunderhorn romanticism musically as well. Artur Schnabel's family grave is located below the Mythen in Schwyz, where the MythenEnsembleOrchestral was founded in 2009.