Bernard Haitink conducts Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G major

Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BR-KLASSIK) shared a long and intensive artistic partnership that was tragically cut short by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding live recordings from concerts in recent years that have not yet been released. This recording of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony documents performances from November 2005 at the Munich Philharmonie in the Gasteig.

Since Haitink first conducted a subscription concert in Munich in 1958, he repeatedly took the helm of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra—in the Hercules Hall of the Residence or in the Philharmonie at Gasteig. The fruitful collaboration lasted more than six decades. Orchestra musicians and singers were just as eager to work with him as BR's sound technicians. As an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, particularly of late German-Austrian Romanticism, Haitink was highly regarded worldwide. Gustav Mahler's symphonies were always in the best possible hands with him. For him, the transparency of the sonic architecture of a musical composition with its multifaceted interweavings was the highest principle: supreme tonal sensitivity combined with a clearly structured interpretation of the score.

In his fourth symphony, Gustav Mahler brought his engagement with the poems from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" to a preliminary climax. Already in the 'Wunderhorn symphonies' Nos. 2 and 3, texts from this collection of poems published between 1805 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim were incorporated. In his fourth symphony, composed between 1899 and 1901, the Wunderhorn poem "Das himmlische Leben" now sounds in the final movement—a poem Mahler had already set to music in 1892. It sketches, from a child's perspective, a vision of the afterlife as a land of milk and honey. With this "heavenly world," Mahler's skeptical view of his contemporary world sketches a utopian counterdesign.