Luogo e data di registrazione		Philharmonie, Berlin (Germania) - maggio 2001
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Executive Producer		Christopher Alder
	Musical Assistance		Henrik Schaefer
	Engineered by		Klaus-Peter Grosz
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 471 623-2 - (1 CD) - durata 78' 07" - (p) 2002 - DDD
	Note		Cover Photos: Groth, Groth, Caselli, Groth (fron left to right)

THE SEVENTH SYMPHONY - Mahler on the Move Mahler was a great musical traveller: we depart ot ttie beginning of one of the symphinies and arrive at our destination only at the very end of its finale. Even in his early works there is an identifiable kind of "travelling" music. Think, for example, of the prominent timpani ostinato in Das klagende Lied, or the animated melody to which the protagonist of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen sets out on his journeying in the cycle's second song, music which resurfaces in the First Symphony and eventually culminates in a conclusion for removed from its point of departure. Mahler's difficulty in completing his Seventh Symphony may have had to do with the absence of what for him was indispensable: the idea (or ideas) that would initiate such a journey. When he came to compose the work he was living in a villa on the Wörthersee, and to reach it he sometimes had to be rowed across the lake. One of these homeward journeys proved to have momentous consequences. Two of the three middle movements, the two nocturnes (Nachtmusiken) had been composed at Maiernigg during the summer of 1904. It was not until the next summer, jowever, that he completed the Seventh in an extraordinary eruption of creativity, and it was the trip across the lake, and specifically the rhythm of the oars, that - in Mahler's own words in a letter to Alma - enabled him to overcome the block that had prevented him from finishing the work: "I got into the boat to be rowed across. At the first stroke of the oars the theme (or rather the rhythm and character) of the introduction to the first movement came into my head - and in four weeks the first, third and fifth movements were done!" Knowing what we do about the inception of the Introduction - with the composer himself on the move across the lake - we can hear the opening movement in two senses, first as the outset of a jpurney, and secondly as a graphic document of a nocturnal though not exclusively natural world. There is a human being at the centre of all of this, Mahler himself embarking and disembarking and then continuing his journey through the medium of his unique imagination. The sombre, throbbing, drenched-in-darkness rhythm of the first bars persists throughout the movement as a continuous, pervading presence, a later form of "travelling music", reminding us that, along with the composer, we are in progress towards an unknown, undeclared destination. With hindsight we may well recognize as the anticipation of some distant goal, yet to be achieved, the key of C major in which the sweeping second subject is first revealed, a melody that, albeit only temporarily, seems to run counter to the prevailing sombreness of spirit and landscape and to have its roots in human passion. But while that surge of feeling, and its later sublime B major transformation in the development, can be related meaningfully to the symphony's journeying protagonist, we must also note how the melody itself, or motives drawn from it, are subjected to frequent distortion, if not indeed, contortion. Nothing, it seems, is plain sailing. In the first Nachtmusik, Mahler has forsaken boat and oars and epic gestures for a kind of domesticated military march music, humble in scale, and (in the trios) for genial, serenade-like tunes more appropriate to a Stadtpark than a regimental parade ground. What is quite peculiar, however, is the startling incorporation of shrill sounds of nature we thought we had left behind in the first movement. After a few bars' articulation of march motives and rhythms (horn solos) we are deluged by a torrential cadenza of birdsong for the woodwind, heralding the appearance of the first march section proper. Odder, surreal even, are the weird interpolations of cowbells, remote and mysterious, almost like sounds from another planet, summoning up a location unimaginably distant from the materials that make up the rest of the movement. How does one make sense of this or of the contrast, which could not be sharper, between the cadenzas of bird cries and the sometimes humdrum character of the marches? As the symphony progresses, contrast, contradiction, discontinuity, paradox and a manifest illogic come to seem among its prime compositional tactis. What follows is perhaps the most enigmatic of Mahler's scherzos, marked "shadowy" [schattenhaft], a wild dance in a relentless D minor from which the warmth of life has been almost entirely drained. Textures are spare and gaunt and the instrumentation consistently shriller than before. The final stroke on the timpani (hard stick, quickly smothered) at the end could well be heard as indicating an end to travelling. The cessation of mobility has left us in a landscape peopled by ghosts. If the narrative is to resume, the only option must be ti pursue another direction. In this sense the second Nachtmusik (F major), marked, most unusually, "Andante amoroso", embarks on an ascent out of the desolation to which the Scherzo has reduced us. After the miniature three-bar introduction, marked "Mit Auf schwung", the "serenade" begins, delivered over a harp ostinato characteristic of Mahler's "travelling" mode. We are at the beginning of yet another, though leisurely, journey, apparent above all in the syncopated figuration heard at once from the clarinets and oboes, to which the horn contributes a quasi-march motive and rhythm. In short, this is active music, asserting mobility, not dawdling or dreams. But where is the musical feature most directly associated with the strumming of guitar and mandolin, the irresistible, immediately memorable, singable tune? The first time anything like an extebnded melody surfaces is mid-way through the movement in what functions as the movement's trio, and which, as it develops, begins to speak with the accents of human passion: "love" has made a late entry on the scene, but in a guise still far removed from the familiar world of the serenade. It was widely reported at the rehearsals of the première, in Prague in 1908, that when Mahler came to the finale he would remark: "And now for daylight ['Der Tag'], or words to that effect. On reaching the end of this epic journey through the night, darkness is to give way to light. The key of C major, of course, has long been hinted at en route as a possible goal, and Mahler takes care to spell this out at the very beginning of his Finale with an undisguised reference to the music in  Act III of Wagner's Meistersinger where darkness is dispelled, a trasformation celebrated in the opera in a boisterous C major. (Mahler included Meistersinger Prelude in all the performances of the Seventh he conducted himself.) But as the movement proceeds, each stage of which is marked by a repeat of the initiating flourish, it becomes clear that Mahler is doing exactly what he has done in every preceding movement: setting up an image, a convention, a context, and then testing it, to discover if it can still generate meaningful music. In this sense, the finale not only sustains the symphony's underlying probing spirit but also the protagonist's journeying. Where in fact are we being led? The pomp and circumstance of the initiating ritornello over - it is as if Mahler needed Wagner's precedent to sanction so triumphalist a revival of C - we find ourselves exploring entirely different musical territories - minuet-like passages marked "Grazioso", quotes from eminent predecessors, not just Wagner but Mozart, too. How else can we respond to the "Turkish" music that suddenly erupts, except by reference to Mozart's Entführung? Or are we to suppose that this is something our traveller hears on the street, much, one supposes, as Mozart himself may have done? There is self-quotation, too, for example those almost comically exaggerated glissandi for the strings: was Mahler remembering his early years in Hungary? Large stretches are conspicuously diatonic, a startling switch after the complex harmonies of the first four movements. A further contrast resides in the chamber-like textures and generally subdued dynamics. On the other hand, what unpredictably emerge in these episodes are ceaseless rhythmic dislocations and abrupt changes in tempo. The idea of the march, so vigorously launched by the ritornello, continues to be a presence, but now far removed from the monumental character of the first movement of the subtle ironies of the first Nachtmusik. We are bieng led into a new musical region, one which might be described as "a condition of innocence". Often very beautiful, benign and even gently humorous, it also counters - even subverts - the pretensions of the ritornello that persists in interrupting this peculiar idyll's pursuit of its arrhythmic, asymmetrical trail. There is a clue to the eventual outcome in the first two bars of the finale's opening drum solo: pitches outlining the E minor triad before C major engulfs us. Thus Mahler juxtaposes the two "alternative" tonics, still leaving open the question as to which will triumph. However, at the climax of the movement, when intense pressure has accumulated to resolve the narrative, to terminate the journey, Mahler returns to the cyclic procedure that he had so often deployed in his previous finales. The great march from the first movement is rediscovered, but we are returned not to E minor but to C minor, a moment of high drama and a tonal move that assaults the reality of the ritornello's C major, or at least hangs a huge question mark over it. Mahler keeps us in suspense to the very last: even in the penultimate bar he introduces a vertiginous pause on an augmented triad. What sounds a note ofgenuine triumph is not so much the final assertion of C major, a key that has had to bear a heavy load of scrutiny, but rather Mahler's fantastic exploitation of bells, not only conventional orchestral bells but cowbells, too. In the first Nachtmusik where the cowbells are heard at a vast distance, one seemed to stand on the brink of an experience with no apparent means of interpreting it. Inevitably one recalls that moment here, as cowbells join wih orchestral bells to create a torrent of joy, reminding us that there may still be something to celebrate in mankind's capacity to survive, and make sense of, this audacious journey through music, history, nature, space and time. Donald Mitchell