Luogo e data di registrazione		Severance Hall, Cleveland (USA) - febbraio 2010
	Registrazione: live / studio		live
	Production		Clasart Classic and Deutsche Grammophon GmbH
	Executive Producer		Ute Fesquet
	Producer		Christoph Claßen
	Recording Engineer (Tonmeister)		Tobias Lehmann (Teldex Studio Berlin)
	Assistant Engineer		Jesse Brayman
	Project Coordinator		Matthies Spindler
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 00289 477 9060 - (1 CD) - durata 73' 24" - (p) 2010 - DDD
	Note		Cover Photo © Harald Hoffmann

Pierre Boulez in conversation With Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Adagio from the Tenth Symphony you're now completing your Mahler cycle for Deutsche Grammophon. Have you saved the best till last? There are many pieces that could be described as "the best of Mahler". But I find the musical vocabulary of the Adagio particularly forward-looking. For me, it’s a summation of all Mahler had ever written. At the same time, it places a question mark over the future, indicating that Mahler would have continued to develop if he’d lived a little longer. In which direction would he have developed? That’s difficult to say. There are links with early Schoenberg, for example, especially the Gurre-Lieder, whose moods and range of expression come very close to parts of the Adagio in terms of their musical language. But we can’t argue on this basis that Mahler would necessarily have developed in the direction of Schoenberg. In this respect his final work remains ambiguous. And what about Des Knaben Wunderhorn? First, one has to see that Mahler wasn’t attempting to create a large-scale form here as he was inthe Adagio, which is very long and complex. Des Knaben Wunderhorn is made up, conversely, of individual miniatures. This particular compositional form was typical of the early Romantics and recalls the songs of composers such as Schubert and Schumann. To that extent, it’s firmly anchored in the past, but in terms of its expression and harmonic language it’s a rather more progressive work. It combines the two extremes between which Mahler vacillated all his life. Since the 1960s there have been several attempts to complete Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony on the basis of the composer's sketches. What's your attitude to these attempts? These attempts are, from my point of view, very unsatisfying. I have in my possession a facsimile of Mahler’s jottings for the Tenth Symphony. Much of it is sketched out in only a very rudimentary fashion, making it impossible to draw any conclusions about the intended polyphonic textures. When compared to the complexity of the Ninth, these “completions” seem to me rather poor. It’s now fifteen years since you made your first Mahler recording for Deutsche Grammophon with the Sixth. How did you discover Mahler and how has your view of him changed in the meantime? I discovered Mahler only retrospectively. I was initially interested in Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, as Mahler’s works weren’t performed in France during my youth. So it was only later on that I discovered in him a precursor of the New Viennese School associated with Schoenberg. Today, of course, I feel much closer to Mahler as I've conducted him so often. How hard is it to conduct Mahler? And what’s the attraction? For me, the biggest difficulty lies in grasping the large-scale form. The narrative must make sense, especially in the long movements in which a lot happens musically. It’s always a question of ensuring that the events are continuous. In the final movement of the Sixth Symphony, for example, there are a lot of climaxes. If you stress them all equally, the listener loses all sense of orientation. And so the conductor has to work out which passages are the most important to him. And how do you work that out? You should never have only an abstract concept. It’s not enough to look for the form, you have to feel it, too. Only then will it sound natural. And you must at all costs maintain a sense of spontaneity. But this can happen only when you're utterly familiar with the score. With Mahler the most advanced symphonic procedures often rub shoulders with highly effective folk-like passages. How do you mediate between the two? If you overemphasize the popular, folk-like element, you’ve already lost the battle. Mahler transforms these set pieces from the world of triviality and does so with sarcasm and irony, which is very difficult to convey musically. It‘s interesting that throughout his life Mahler drew his inspiration from the same musical sources, but in his later symphonies in particular he treats this raw material from the world of folk music with a sense of critical distance. The conductor always has to keep his eye on this ambivalence between critical distance and nostalgia. Presumably the Cleveland Orchestra, with which you’ve long been associated, is exactly the right orchestra to explore this ambivalence in the most appropriate way? The Cleveland Orchestra was the first American orchestra I conducted, and from the very outset I felt at home with its extraordinary fullness of sound. This was the sound that had been created by its then principal conductor, George Szell. Although this has now changed in keeping with the times in which we live, l’m still immensely fond of this orchestra because it continues to come very close to my own idea of the way in which a score should be realized in terms of the music and its sonorities. Pierre Boulez was talking to Sören Ingwersen Translation: Stewart Spencer