hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt

Compositions are created during the most varied stages of life, influenced by inner conflicts and social crises. The Frankfurt Radio Symphony com­bines reflective works from different eras in its concert at the Musikfest Berlin. Gustav Mahler worked on his unfinished 10th Symphony towards the end of his life during a period of intense physical and mental suffering. While Rebecca Saunders explores the limits of individual expression in her work for piano and orchestra “to an utterance”, in which the solo piano part played by the fascinating pianist Tamara Stefanovich is placed firmly in the foreground, the eight French horns in Helmut Lachenmann’s “My Melodies” form a homogeneous solo ensemble whose tonal potential is exploited to the full.

In Rebecca Saunders’ compositions, the desperate and occasionally stifled attempt at expression and communication plays an ever-recurring role, also in the piano concerto “to an utterance” composed in 2020 in which the piano struggles as a disembodied object to formulate its own language. The protagonist grapples with its history in a manic monologue before finally falling silent. The soloist is the exceptional pianist and expert for music of the 20th and 21st century, Tamara Stefanovich.

Gustav Mahler died in May 1911 before completing his 10th Symphony. He left behind sketches in various stages of completion for all five of the projected movements of the symphony, but only the first movement, “Adagio”, was worked into a full score. The sketches for his final symphony were undertaken during a period of deep personal and social-political crisis. Musically speaking, this first movement of the symphony with its complex harmonies extends further into the modern age than any other of Mahler’s late works.

Impressed by the beauty of the French horn octet in a rehearsal of his opera “Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern”, Helmut Lachenmann resolved to compose a work for orchestra featuring an ensemble of eight horns. The compositional process proved to be arduous: the origins of this new magnum opus began with intensive rehearsals and experimentation with the horn section of the Symphonieorchester des Bayrischen Rundfunks which gave the premiere of “My Melodies”.