NSO: Dame Sarah Connolly & Mihhail Gerts

National Symphony Orchestra
Mihhail Gerts conductor
Dame Sarah Connolly mezzo-soprano

Dvořák In Nature’s Realm
Alma Mahler (arr. Colin and David Matthews) Six Songs

‘Die stille Stadt’
‘Laue Sommernacht’
‘Licht in der Nacht’
‘Waldseligkeit’
‘In meines Vaters Garten’ 
‘Bei dir ist es traut’

Mahler Symphony No. 1, Titan

As nature takes centre-stage this season, an enthralling journey of the senses in Mahler’s First Symphony, the Titan, a tale of birth, suffering and eventual redemption cast on a vast scale.

Hailed ‘a worthy heir to Janet Baker’, Dame Sarah Connolly is one of today’s great singers. ‘Whatever she sings, you get singing straight from the heart’ (The Times). 

She describes six songs by Mahler’s wife, Alma Mahler, as ‘voluptuous, coquettish, Wagnerian in intensity and harmony, yet intimate, sensual, charming and surprising… [their] word-painting is delicate, sensual and beautiful’.

Did you know?

Despite his love of nature, Dvořák suffered from agoraphobia – a fear of open spaces. In Nature’s Realm is a hymnal to the landscape of his native Bohemia pointing to his deep affinity for the environment.

Mahler borrowed the name ‘Titan’ from a four-volume novel by the German Romanticist Jean Paul: a portrait of a young man beset by emotional tragedy who grows into maturity through finding true love and his absorption in nature.

Mahler marked the Titan’s third movement to be played ‘Mit Parodie’.

Alma Mahler was the daughter of the painter Emil Schindler.

Only 17 of the more than 50 songs she wrote survive.

Her husband, Gustav Mahler, insisted she stopped composing.

Listen out in the Titan for…

The imaginative orchestral colouring: the dazzling opening with cuckoo calls in woodwinds; a far-distant hunting song; and a duet between cellos and woodwinds (borrowing a theme from his Songs of a Wayfarer) that sees nature bursting forth in all its wonder.

The macabre humour of the slow third movement echoing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with its ironically lowering horns; and the double bass soloist quoting the French nursery rhyme Frère Jacques.

The ending of the symphony has been described as ‘like a chorale from Paradise after the waves of Hell. Saved!'