Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus & Hermann Scherchen - Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor "Resurrection" (Remastered) (2020) [Hi-Res]

High Resolution Mastering of one of the best Mahler No. 2 in Stereo!

Mahler composed his Second Symphony over a period of seven years. He began the first and second movements in January of 1888, around the same time that Die drei Pintos—a comic opera left unfinished at death by Carl Maria von Weber that Mahler had taken on the task of completing in 1887—premiered in Leipzig. Although his work on the second movement Andante yielded only a few melodies, the composer managed to draft the first movement in a mere ten months. Nevertheless, 1889 presented him with a series of tremendous setbacks. Mahler’s father, mother, and sister Leopoldine all died within a few months of one another, and an unfavorable response met the premiere of his First Symphony on 20 November 1889. Perhaps for these reasons—not to mention the demands of the conducting position he then occupied at the Hungarian Royal Opera—Mahler put aside all composition. He did not return to the project that would become Symphony no. 2 until the summer months of 1893. During the intervening years, the composer would not only relocate from Budapest to Hamburg in order to take up a conducting position at the latter’s Stadttheater (City Theater), but attempt to have the first movement performed and published as an independent symphonic poem entitled Todtenfeier (Funeral Rites).

Resumption of work on the Second Symphony coincided with the composer’s continued interest in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) settings as early as 1887. He commenced writing the song “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” (“St. Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes”) for voice and piano in July of 1893 while simultaneously creating a purely orchestral version of the same material; the latter, combined with a trio section based on ideas absent from the vocal rendition, became the symphony’s third movement. Likewise, “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”), another Wunderhorn text set the previous year for voice and piano, received orchestral accompaniment, and the composer also expanded the Andante’s themes (abandoned as sketches back in 1888) into a complete movement. These would become the fourth and second movements respectively. Thus, Mahler had finished the internal movements by August of 1893, and during the following winter, he revealed to his friend Josef Foerster that he had begun a new symphony.

Yet the piece still lacked a finale. Inspiration for this movement did not come to Mahler until he attended the funeral for his fellow Hamburg conductor Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) on 29 March 1894. Even though he had already been considering a choral close for the symphony, this somber event provided the composer with a textual basis for the last movement when the words of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s (1724-1803) “Auferstehen” (“Resurrection”) sounded from the organ loft. (The poet intended these lines for singing to a pre-existing melody, such as the Lutheran congregational hymn Jesus Christus, unser Heiland [Jesus Christ, our Savior], though the actual tune Mahler heard remains unknown). To the first two stanzas of Klopstock’s lyric the composer appended twenty-seven lines of his own devising, and with this poetry in hand, Mahler created a monumental movement before three months had passed. ...

Mimi Cortese, soprano
Lucretia West, contralto
Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Vienna State Academy Chamber
ChoirHermann Scherchen, conductor

Digitally remastered