Konzerthausorchester Berlin

Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is not only one of his most popular works, it also represents the dawn of new music – in 1901 the composer turned his back on the pathos of late Romanticism and pointed the way towards 20th century music. Before this, Luigi Nono commemorates a Chilean revolutionary in quivering tones that create a wave of strength and light – albeit in sonic form.

With “Como una ola de fuerza y luz” (Like a wave of strength and light), Luigi Nono composed a secular requiem for Luciano Cruz Aguayo, one of the co-founders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) in Chile, who died in an accident in 1971. His lament uses subtle techniques of post-serial composition full of musical tensions described in the title as a “wave” of micro-variations in pitch, rhythm and timbre. The Konzerthausorchester Berlin conducted by Joana Mallwitz will perform Nono’s moving lament, whose second part focuses on action in the future that might grow out of this tragic loss. It will be sung by the soprano Sarah Aristidou, with Tamara Stefanovich at the piano. The evening’s main symphonic work is Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which, in the composer’s own words begins as if the music “cannot count to three” before switching to “the great one and all.” In the ghostly scherzo with its solo violin tuned one entire tone higher, death “strokes the fiddle bizarrely and plays us up to Heaven,” as the composer and conductor Bruno Walter puts it, while, after a restful Adagio, the work as a whole concludes with a strange (inherently inconsistent) vision of paradise in the “Wunderhorn” song “Wir genießen die himmlischen Freuden” (We delight in the joys of Heaven): “It is the serenity of a higher world in there that holds something terrible and horrific for us,” Mahler said.