Is Sibelius's Seventh Symphony a “heroic failure” or a “beauty stripped of all that is not essential”? And does his Sixth Symphony smell like first snow, as the composer himself considered? Chief conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste presents a clear view of Sibelius’s last symphonies. “Gerhaher shades each note and word with such beauty and subtlety that it feels as if he’s whispering into your ear.” (The Times) The Munich baritone's visit is a landmark event for fans of German vocal music.
Jean Sibelius had started sketching his sixth symphony in 1914, while working on his fifth, but the world war put an end to his visits abroad and no major commissions were forthcoming. As life returned more to normal, he decided to revive his sketches, while at the same time his head was full of ideas for his great seventh symphony. The sixth differs considerably from those that came before and after. Its themes are less dramatic, its orchestration lighter, and its harmonies less marked by tension. It was nevertheless a logical link in his symphonic chain. Its form is more traditional than that of the fifth, being more in the nature of a fantasia. Though the movements each appear to have their own distinct character – an opening one in more or less sonata form, a slow one, a scherzo and a finale – their keys deviate little from the conventional scheme, and even their themes spring from the same initial source. Sibelius himself said that the sixth offered its listeners cold spring water rather than party drinks. “It always reminds me of the scent of the first snow.”
Though love and death run like a red line throughout the works of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), he possibly bares his soul most openly in his songs. Many of the best-known melodies in his symphonies in fact began life in an orchestral song. In poetry he sought profound symbolism and “the most beautiful sound in all the world”, that of the human voice.
The Songs of a Wayfarer are a cycle of four songs premiered in Berlin in 1897. As if to underline the unstable life of the eternal wanderer, each of the songs begins and ends in different keys. When my sweetheart is married wallows in self-pity, which the jolly interludes do nothing to dispel. I went this morning over the field, painted in pastoral hues, is the happiest of the four songs. Mahler used the melody of this song almost as such in his first symphony. I have a gleaming knife, in which the wayfarer both mourns his lost love and dreams of death, is the most tragic and most defiant of the set, and in The two blue eyes of my beloved he resigns himself to his fate; all is lost.
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) was in many ways a bridge between the Romantic and Modernist eras. Like Schumann, he was a tragic figure, a Wunderkind and pianist later engulfed by manic depression who tried to drown himself and spent the last years of his life in a lunatic asylum. A composer of Lieder following in the footsteps of Schubert and Schumann, he looked upon Wagner as his idol but took Wagner’s radical harmonies in an increasingly radical, chromatic direction. Best remembered for his solo songs, he made 50 settings of poems by Goethe (1749–1832) in 1888–1889, as if to prove to his colleagues his ability to delve deeper into the psychological dimensions of the great German poet. The three Harp Player songs paint a portrait of a melancholy wanderer who gives himself up to loneliness (I), passing from door to door and receiving alms (II) and finally sighing that “who never ate his bread in tears knows not the heavenly powers that bring us into life” (III).
“It’s almost like a scream. It’s the most depressed C major in all of musical literature. There’s no other piece that ends in C major where you feel it’s the end of the world,” cried Simon Rattle. Composing his seventh symphony (1924) had been a laborious process for Sibelius, and it had taken a long time to mature. It was originally titled Fantasia Sinfonica and not renamed Symphony No. 7 until a year after its premiere. Having completed it, Sibelius apparently felt he had nothing more to say in the genre. Though he did begin work on an eighth symphony, the score has not been preserved for posterity. As it is, the seventh represents the culmination of his constant search for symphonic and thematic economy. Here, at last, he was able to crystallise the idea he expressed in a discussion with Gustav Mahler in 1907, of “the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the motifs”.
Cast in a single movement, the seventh undergoes constant development from a simple core motif to a vast network, and it differs radically from all his previous symphonies. It is possibly his most enigmatic and hence most exhaustively-analysed work. Olin Downes the critic heard it as beauty stripped to its bare essentials.
German baritone Christian Gerhaher (born 1969) is one of the leading Lieder interpreters of our time. He has been a highly sought-after Lieder, concert, and opera singer for over a quarter of a century, performing on all the major stages worldwide.
Gerhaher is a professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He has received numerous significant awards and honours for his work. Among the most recent are membership of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz (2024), the Robert-Schumann-Preis (2023), and an honorary doctorate by the University of Zurich (2023).
According to the profile published by the University of Zurich on Gerhaher’s honorary doctorate, he ’can be considered a learned musician in the most profound sense' ('Gerhaher kann als im tiefen Sinne gelehrter Musiker gelten’).
Gerhaher studied vocal arts with Paul Kuën, Raimund Grumbach, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Inge Borkh, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Alongside his vocal studies, he also studied medicine and holds a doctoral degree.
Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, has established himself as one of the outstanding conductors of his generation. Born in Finland in 1956, he began his career as a violinist. Today, he is renowned as an artist of exceptional versatility and breadth.
Saraste has previously held principal conductorships at the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and has served as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. As a guest conductor, he appears with major orchestras worldwide, including the Orchestre de Paris, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Symphony Orchestras of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Coaching and mentoring young musicians is of great importance to Saraste. He is a founding member of the LEAD! Foundation, a mentorship programme for young conductors and soloists.
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