Luogo e data di registrazione		Großes Festspielhaus, Salyburg (Austria) - luglio 2011
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Production		A production of UNITEL in co-production with ZDF/Arte, in cooperation with Wiener Philharmoniker, SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE and CLASSICA
	Media Relations Coordinator of the Salzburg Festival		Matthias Schulz
	Concert Director of the Salzburg Festival		Markus Hinterhäuser
	Recording Producer		Sibylle Strobel
	Recording Engineers (Tonmeister)		Gernot Hoffmann (ORF) / Peter Hecker
	Mix		Rainel Maillard (EBS)
	Audio Technicians		Maaike Decock / Marc Dahmen
	Production Manager		Judit Stassak
	Producer		Magdalena Herbst
	Executive Producers		Ute Fesquet / Angelika Meissner
	Project Coordinators		Matthias Spindler / Veronika Weiher
	Publisher		Universal Edition A.G,, Wien
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 00289 477 9891 - (1 CD) - durata 64' 34" - (p) 2011 - DDD
	Note		Cover Photo © Roger Mastroianni

The Fin de Siècle in Vienna It was not until Alban Berg attended the belated first performance of Mahler’s fairy-tale cantata Das klagende Lied on 17 February 1901 that he became one of Mahler’s greatest admirers: "A glorious work!!!!" was his reaction. On 12 January 1902 he managed to purloin the baton that his hero had used to conduct the local première of his Fourth Symphony in Vienna, and from then on he guarded it as if it were some sacred relic. Not until five years later, however, was he introduced to his idol, when several of Mahler’s friends and admirers, including Schoenberg and Alfred Roller, gathered at the Westbahnhof in Vienna to bid farewell to Mahler and his wife on their departure for New York. A year after l\/lahler’s death Berg attended the posthumous first performance of the Ninth Symphony, in which Bruno Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. Afterwards he described the first movement as "the most magnificent thing that Mahler ever wrote". Berg’s enthusiasm for Mahler’s music inevitably left traces on his own output - it is no accident that, after glancing through the score of Berg’s Three Pieces op. 6, Adorno thought they must “sound like Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces op. 16 being played at the same time as lVlahler’s Ninth Symphony”, a comment that Berg took as a compliment. The vibrantly impassioned suite that Berg drew from his opera Lulu (on the play Pandora’s Box by Wedekind, which concerns the social rise and fall of a fatally attractive anti-heroine) likewise reflects Mahler’s influence; "Nowhere", wrote Adorno, "is the relationship with the late Mahler clearer than it is here." For the opening concert of the 2011 Salzburg Festival, Pierre Boulez programmed Mahler’s rarely heard cantata with the Symphonic Pieces from Berg’s opera Lulu. This ambitious programme was acclaimed as such by the press, the critic of the Badische Zeitung, for example, noting that "the structuralist on the podium and the sound magicians from Vienna perfectly complemented one another", while the Wiener Zeitung spoke of a "high-energy balancing act between sensual colours and rigorous structure". Anna Prohaska proved, in the words of Der Standard, to be "cannily ideal casting, revealing an abstract lyricism and clarity while trusting as much in the presence and warm sonorities of the Vienna Philharmonic as in the effective realization of rapid passages." Boulez conducted the two-movement version of Mahler’s ballad-like cantata that dates from 1898-99. According to the Salzburger Nachrichten he created a "wonderfully lit widescreen canvas" in which the "effects of the offstage orchestra occasionally made a three-dimensional impression". It is no accident that the conductor - a past master of economic gestures on the podium - once described Mahler’s early work as "a theatre of the mind, with actual stage effects applied to the concert hall". The work tells a gruesome tale of fratricide and describes a minstrel who carves a magic flute from one of the bones of the murdered brother. Originally cast in three movements, it was submitted to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s Beethoven Competition in 1881, but the jury rejected it. Mahler’s attempts to have the piece performed came to nothing, and so he revised the score in 1893, removing the offstage orchestra, reducing the number of vocal soloists and rowing back from the original orchestration with its demand for unusual instruments. Finally the whole of the opening movement (“Waldmärchen”) was discarded, reducing the length of the work by half. And yet not even in this reduced form was Mahler able to persuade a concert promoter to perform Das klagende Lied. When planning to publish the work in 1898 he therefore abandoned some of the changes he had already made, deleting the movement headings, reversing a number of instrumental retouchings and restoring the offstage orchestra in what had previously been the second movement ("Hochzeitsstück"). "I shall have to alter a whole passage, that is restore it to its original form,” Mahler told Natalie Bauer-Lechner. "It is the partwhere I use two orchestras, one of them in the distance outside the hall. I knew no one would ever do that!" The extent to which Mahler’s music looks to the future is clear, not least from the passages for offstage orchestra, passages the composer uses to create changes of perspective that recall the editing techniques of the cinema. In the final section, for example, the entry of the offstage orchestra brings with it an audible change in perspective, as the festive music coming from the castle - played first by the main orchestra and then, seamlessly intercut with it, by the offstage band - moves away into the distance, while the gaze of the audience is directed at the minstrel, outside in the open fields, who is told about the impending wedding. In the eyes of Pierre Boulez, Mahler was a “Janus-faced figure. On the one hand he was so modern and there are so many forward-looking elements in his music, while on the other hand he was very closely associated with the Viennese tradition. It is possible, therefore, to see him from every angle and turn him in every direction. The question as to which angle we adopt must be answered by each of us in his or her own way.” Harald Hodeige Translation: Stewart Spencer