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Tag: Mariss Jansons

Published November 9, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Mariss Jansons conducts Sibelius, Weber and Bartok 2017 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

Mariss Jansons has been a regular guest of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 1976, but in fact he already conducted them five years earlier: during the Karajan Conducting Competition, which he won then in his late twenties. In 2015 the Latvian conductor raved in an interview with the Berliner Morgenpost: “I love this orchestra. The musicians are not only absolutely fantastic instrumentalists – they are truly passionate. Their artistic dedication is unbelievable. It is a joy for me every time I make music with the top-class orchestra.”

For his next concerts with the orchestra, Mariss Jansons has selected a programme that encompasses different eras of music history. This musical journey through time starts with the Clarinet Concerto in F minor, which Weber wrote in 1811 for Heinrich Joseph Baermann, clarinetist with the Munich court orchestra. He had a clarinet of the latest design, and it was this that provided the composer with the inspiration for this brilliant concerto. However, even the melancholy yet elegant first movement goes much further than mere virtuoso musical display: the music develops an inner drama that derives its power from the juxtaposition of bravura figures and elegiac tranquility. With its Romantic musical language, the atmospheric Adagio already hints at the Freischütz, while in contrast, the lively Rondo which follows makes for a dashing finale. The soloist is Andreas Ottensamer, principal clarinetist with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Jean Sibelius’s E minor symphony, which Mariss Jansons has also programmed, was composed 88 years after Weber’s musical stroke of genius – a first symphony in which the Finnish composer formally oriented himself towards the models of the genre, but in so doing found his way to a highly individual national romantic inflection (not for nothing did Armas Järnefelt, Sibelius’s brother-in-law, summarise: “He transformed everything that reached his ear into ‘Sibelius’”).

The concert concludes with the suite from the expressionist dance pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, which Béla Bartók, as an ostentatious renunciation of the aestheticism of traditional ballets, intended to reflect “the repulsiveness of the civilized world”. The premiere, which took place at the Cologne Opera on 27 November 1926 conducted by Jenő Szenkár, turned out to be a scandal which even prompted a political intervention: the conductor was summoned to the office of Konrad Adenauer, then the mayor, who banned Bartók’s piece from the schedule …

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/23505

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Published November 9, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Mariss Jansons conducts Dvorak’s Symphony “From the New World” 2012 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

Anyone thinking of Czech music has a specific sound in mind: colourful, passionate, decidedly rhythmical, mildly exotic and almost always with a melancholy undertone. These and many other facets of the music of Bohemia and Moravia are to be found in this concert with Mariss Jansons and violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann. Following works by Smetana and Bohuslav Martinů, the evening culminates in Antonín Dvořák’s famous Symphony No. 9 From the New World.

With at least two of his works, Bedřich Smetana added to his country’s cultural heritage: the cycle Má vlast, and the opera The Bartered Bride, from which we will hear the fast-paced overture in this concert. Bohuslav Martinů’s Second Violin Concerto is more restrained, reflecting the composer’s state of mind when he wrote the work in exile in the USA during the Second World War. His homesickness is conveyed through many of the Czech folk-inspired melodies. Five decades before, Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World”, full of inspiration and verve, originated in a similar way, leaving a lasting monument to Czech (much more than to American) folk music.

Mariss Jansons, chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks has long been a close friend of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Among his recordings which first attracted the attention of the international music world is his recording of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, full of emotional depth and exciting details: a performance that still impresses today.

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/2886

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Published November 9, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Mariss Jansons conducts “World Encores” at the Waldbühne 2002 720p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

Strictly speaking, the annual Waldbühne Concert of the Berliner Philharmoniker is itself an encore, coming as it does at the end of a ten-month season in the city’s Philharmonie, during which time the orchestra has worked its way through the great symphonic repertory. Only then is it able to step away from the classical canon at its final appearance before its summer break and spend the evening out of doors. And since the orchestra practically never performs an encore at any of its normal subscription concerts, the players decided that in 2002 they would bring together everything that might serve this purpose and present a selection of World Encores under the baton of Mariss Jansons.

They were supported in this by the Russian violinist Vadim Repin, who was making his debut with the Philharmoniker. According to the critic of the Berliner Morgenpost, his was an “entirely successful debut. With his virtuosically thrilling playing Repin remained the key player”, dazzling his audience not only with showpieces by Wieniawski and Tchaikovsky but also with Kreisler’s Tambourin chinois and Gardel’s famous tango Por una cabeza. Following Paganini’s Variations on Carnevale di Venezia, the appreciative audience refused to let him go until he had repeated the famous melody a few more times – in Germany the tune is sung to the words “Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken” – and provided what might almost be described as an encore to an encore.

As for the purely orchestral pieces, they ranged from the Expressionist scream of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin to Sibelius’s melancholy Valse triste and to operatic excerpts by composers such as Moniuszko, Massenet and Mascagni, culminating in New Year’s favourites by Ziehrer and Lumbye. Time and again the various orchestral departments were able to show off their skills. Listen, for example, to the virtuosic drummers in the ballet music Yugen by the Japanese composer Yuzo Toyama and to the resplendent brass in the prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Not for a moment was the audience bored, and at the end they all joined in a typically spirited rendition of the evening’s only genuine encore, Paul Lincke’s Berliner Luft, a piece that is now such a regular part of the Waldbühne programme as the end-of-season concert itself.

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/23688

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Published November 9, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Mariss Jansons and Truls Mork 2016 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

“The Tenth Symphony made an incredibly great impression on me, even when I was just a small boy in Riga. I always loved Shostakovich. … My inner world is closely linked with his,” Mariss Jansons admitted in an interview. From childhood on, the music of the Russian composer has been familiar to him – not least due to the collaboration of his father, conductor Arvīds Jansons, with Yevgeny Mravinsky, principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic and later Mariss Jansons’s teacher, who premiered many of Shostakovich’s works.

From the beginning of his career, the native Latvian has espoused the Russian composer; today, he is considered the leading Shostakovich interpreter. Also as guest conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker he frequently devotes himself to his works, though he has not yet conducted his Tenth Symphony here. It is the first symphony with which Shostakovich went public after his ideological ostracism in the year 1948, ending only after Stalin’s death in 1953. The work generated heated contention after the premiere: the sombre mood of the first three movements and the seemingly artificial cheerfulness of the Finale were vexing.

The first part of this concert programme opens with Hector Berlioz’s brilliant overture Le Carnaval romain, which leads us into completely different musical worlds. Based on themes from his failed opera Benvenuto Cellini, the overture quickly became one of the French composer’s most successful pieces. The second work on the programme was inspired by verses from the cycle Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire: Henri Dutilleux composed his expressive cello concerto entitled Tout un monde lointain for the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch. The soloist in this concert is the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk.

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/22404

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Published November 9, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Mariss Jansons and Frank Peter Zimmermann 2015 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

In his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Béla Bartók succeeded in weaving a dense network of relationships between tonal colours; continuous transitions are juxtaposed with direct contrasts. The arrangement of the instrumentalists, targeting spatial sound effects, emphasises the great significance of the orchestral sound: the score states that the strings, split into two quintets, are to be placed to the left and right of the podium so that the two groups converge in the contrabasses at the extreme end of the semicircle, while the middle of the podium is reserved for the percussion. Mariss Jansons selected Bartók’s “masterpiece” (Paul Sacher) for his guest appearance with the Berliner Philharmoniker, as well as the Second Suite from Maurice Ravel’s “Symphonie choréographique” Daphnis et Chloé, which Igor Stravinsky called “one of the most beautiful products of all French music”.

Between these two pieces, Frank Peter Zimmermann plays Dmitri Shostakovich’s emotionally charged Second Violin Concerto, a work which Shostakovich wrote for David Oistrakh’s 60th birthday. However, the composer had miscalculated by one year so that the successful première took place in Moscow on 26 October 1967 when Oistrakh was 59 years old…

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/20429

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Published September 16, 2019

Mariss Jansons – R. Schumann: Symphony No. 1, Op. 38 "Spring" – Schubert: Symphony No. 3, D. 200 (Live) (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Mariss Jansons – R. Schumann: Symphony No. 1, Op. 38 “Spring” – Schubert: Symphony No. 3, D. 200 (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/48 kHz | Time – 58:05 minutes | 575 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik

The two orchestral works on this new CD from BR-KLASSIK reflect early experiments with the symphonic genre by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, who would both later become such important Romantic composers. In his Third Symphony in D major, D. 200, written in the early summer of 1815 and probably first performed at a private concert, the eighteen-year-old Schubert emancipated himself from the style copies of his First and Second Symphonies and finally found his own musical expression. None of his symphonies would be heard in public during his lifetime, however; the Third was first performed as late as 1881 in London, where it was immediately received with great enthusiasm. Schumann’s First Symphony in B flat major, op 38 (after an unfinished symphony he wrote in his youth) was an impressive success for the 31-year-old composer. Two months after its completion, in January 1841, the work was premiered by Felix Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Gewandhaus to great public acclaim.

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Published August 7, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – European Concert from Istanbul with Mariss Jansons and Emmanuel Pahud 2001 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

Every year the Berliner Philharmoniker mark the anniversary of the day they were founded on 1 May 1882, the date on which fifty-four musicians formed a democratically run ensemble that was determined to survive without the support of the State or of a well-to- do patron. Their courage was rewarded and the story of their success has continued right down to the present day. In 2001 the orchestra travelled for the first time to Istanbul, the easternmost tip of Europe, where they gave their eleventh Europakonzert in the Hagia Irene, the Church of the Holy Peace.

On the podium was the Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons, who was then the principal conductor in Pittsburgh and who has always been a welcome guest in Berlin. He began the programme with Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 (“Surprise”), one of the composer’s ten “London” Symphonies. According to the press, Jansons “had obviously been studying period performance techniques”, resulting in “light, bright textures, relatively fast speeds and a phrasing which would have had old Karajan turning in his grave”. Next up was Mozart’s D major Flute Concerto, which was given a brilliant performance by Emmanuel Pahud, the orchestra’s principal flautist since 1992, who brought to the piece his hallmark digital dexterity and velvety mellow tone. At no point does the work betray the fact that Mozart, by his own admission, could not abide the flute.

Following the interval, Jansons conducted Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a key work of Romantic programme music. It tells of a love story that inevitably ends badly, its five movements accompanying the “narrator” on various adventures that extend from a magnificent ball to the narrator’s own execution when he thinks he has murdered his lover out of jealousy. The work culminates in a Witches’ Sabbath. The result is a gripping mixture of sex and crime that has undoubtedly contributed to the work’s lasting success, even if Berlioz himself hoped that “on its own the symphony will provide sufficient musical interest independently of any dramatic intention”.

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/24320

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Published June 20, 2019

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 1-9 (Live) (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Herbert Blomsted, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel – Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 1-9 (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/48 kHz | Time – 09:43:21 minutes | 5,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik

Bruckner’s Nine Symphonies are a constant in the repertoire of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, as in those of all major orchestras. The special feature of the 9 album being presented here by BR KLASSIK is that the recordings are conducted by not only one but a total of four conductors closely associated with the orchestra, all of them proven international Bruckner experts. More than in any other compilation, common features in interpretation (also due to the same orchestra) as well as fascinating differences due to the various interpretive approaches of the respective conductors can all be detected. In these recordings it also becomes clear what brilliant contributions Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons and Lorin Maazel have made over the decades to Bruckner’s symphonic oeuvre.

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Published May 23, 2019

Berliner Philharmoniker – Concert with Mariss Jansons and Hilary Hahn from Suntory Hall 2000 1080p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-CHDWEB

Within days of the official opening of Suntory Hall in October 1986 the Berlin Philharmoniker paid their first visit to this breath-taking concert hall and immediately felt at home, which was hardly surprising since the new hall was modelled on its counterpart in Berlin. From the very outset Suntory Hall established a place for itself in the top league of international concert halls. The Berliner Philharmoniker perform here each time that they visit Japan, and in November 2000 they delighted their Japanese audience with performances of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony and Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. The conductor was Mariss Jansons and the soloist the exceptionally talented American violinist Hilary Hahn.

Jansons first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1976 and since then has developed a particularly close relationship with it. “I love this orchestra. The musicians are not only absolutely fantastic instrumentalists but are also genuinely passionate about their work. Their artistic commitment is incredible. Each time I conduct them, it is a pleasure to appear with this top orchestra.” In Tokyo in November 2000 he led them in a Slav programme. Each of the four movements that make up Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony is marked by the countryside, moods and music of his Bohemian homeland, and we can only agree with Dvořák when he said: “Here I’m not just a pure musician but a poet.”

After the interval Hilary Hahn, performing just a day before her twenty-first birthday, dazzled her Japanese audience with her performance of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, one of the most challenging works in the whole of the violin repertory – its technical demands are a reflection of the abilities of its dedicatee, David Oistrakh. Hilary Hahn effortlessly mastered all of these difficulties, having already performed the work at her Philharmonic debut in December 1999, also under Jansons, when she had provoked veritable storms of enthusiasm on the part of the local press. Der Tagesspiegel praised her “perfect projection and soaring phrases played with the most delicate pianissimo”, while the Berliner Morgenpost summed up her performance as follows: “The sensitivity with which she took up the orchestra’s mood of heaviness and oppression in the opening movement with her delicate and extraordinarily beautiful tone attests to a profound understanding of music and presupposes both sensibility and imagination as well as a lively intelligence. The question as to outstanding virtuosity is one that we no longer need to ask with Hilary Hahn, for she possesses it in abundance.”

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/24516

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Published April 26, 2019

RCO & Mariss Jansons – Stravinsky: Petrushka & Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances (Live) (2005/2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

RCO & Mariss Jansons – Stravinsky: Petrushka & Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances (Live) (2005/2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:09:12 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front covers | © Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Stravinsky’s Petrushka was performed to great public acclaim and recorded in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 29 and 31 October 2004, whilst Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances were recorded later that same year on 22, 23 and 25 December.

From the clear and transparent orchestral sound in Stravinsky’s Petrushka to the full glory of the symphony orchestra in the Rachmaninoff, Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra demonstrate once again the immense artistic heights attained by this unique collaboration between conductor and orchestra.

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