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Mahler Symphony No. 5
Gustav Mahler

Mahler Symphony No. 5

Adam Fischer

Label: CAvi
Format: CD
Barcode: 4260085533954
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Catalog number: AVI 8553395
Releasedate: 06-04-18
- The fourth release of a successfully started cycle by Adam Fischer and the Duesseldorf Symphonic of which Adam Fischer is artistic director.
- The BBC Music Magazine about No. 4: “It’s also the alternation between cataclysm and serenity that Fischer and his fine Dusseldorf musicians capture so well in this live account”. (Nov 2017)
- Adam Fischer is no close friend of any romanticism but a straight and very much looking at the contents and development making music leader.

Adam Fischer on Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

What does Mahler’s Fifth mean personally to you? Unlike certain other Mahler symphonies, I have no personal story I associate with the Fifth. This
doesn’t imply that it is not just as close to me as the other ones; it is just more difficult to express the connection in words.

In 1905, Mahler recorded his own interpretation of this symphony’s first movement on a Welte-Mignon piano roll. Does such a historical document have an influence on you? Certainly. We should try to grasp Mahler’s intentions, but we should not apply them without using our own discretion. The Welte-Mignon recording is an important document to help us learn how to deal with Mahler’s tempo indications. There are those well-known indications of the length of his own orchestral performances: they show, for instance, that the Adagietto, in particular, should be played much more rapidly than we think. Incredibly fast runtimes were clocked in Saint Petersburg and also at the Concertgebouw: when we compare them with the movement runtimes as performed by famous conductors of the 1950s and 1960s, we can tell that “slow”, for Mahler, does not mean “dragging”.

Most of all – this is my fundamental conviction, and here I find it confirmed – slow and fast aren’t just metronome values. You can play faster while sounding slower, and vice-versa. It does not just have to do with maintaining a slow tempo, but with managing the accents so that it also sounds slower.
Sounding slower is more important than merely being slower. You can hear this in the Welte-Mignon recording: Mahler treats his own music in a thoroughly rhapsodic way.