Béla Bartók
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 (1937–1938)
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5 C sharp minor (1901–1903)
- Gürzenich-Orchester Köln
- François-Xavier Roth conductor
- Michael Barenboim violin
The concert reviewer for the Neue Musikzeitung experienced “an overwhelming richness of beauties” when attending the premiere performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in the Cologne Gürzenich. With this symphony, Mahler once again exceeds the dimensions of the customary in a scarcely describable emotional complexity ranging from a funeral march and a ländler (a folk dance in ¾ meter) to a brass band and ravishing impressionist sonorities. Mahler caught some of his contemporaries unprepared with his tonal language, and the composer also swore about this once himself, saying “The Fifth is a cursed work. Nobody understands it.” Today it is one of his most popular works – not least because Luchino Visconti chose the Adagietto from the symphony in his film based on the novella Death in Venice. Mahler’s Fifth is one of many important works introduced to audiences by the Gürzenich Orchestra; thus, with this gala concert, François-Xavier Roth not only celebrates the beginning of the new season but also a little about the history of the Gürzenich Orchestra. For Béla Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto was also given its German premiere by the Gürzenich Orchestra in 1946. The solo violin very much appears to play in opposition to the inhumanity of war: it sings, it dances, it laments and it rejoices in variations brimming over with fantasy. Michael Barenboim, who performs as soloist, has made a name for himself not least as an interpreter of “classical modernist” repertoire on concert podiums around the world.
