Nashville, Tenn. (February 28, 2019) — The Nashville Symphony’s Classical Series resumes on March 8-9 at Schermerhorn Symphony Center with a distinctive program of old and new repertoire, as Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero leads the orchestra on Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and a live recording of American composer Tobias Picker’s The Encantadas.
Guerrero’s affinity for Mahler has made the Austrian composer’s work a regular inclusion in the Nashville Symphony’s annual programming, and Das Lied – featuring alto Michelle DeYoung and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey – exemplifies what makes Mahler one of the most important symphonic composers of all time.
Picker returns to the Schermerhorn following the orchestra’s 2017 performance and recording of his Opera Without Words, which will be paired with The Encantadas on a forthcoming worldwide release on Naxos. Like Das Lied, The Encantadas straddles music, drama and poetry, and Picker himself will narrate the work for the first time during these performances.
Great seats are available starting at $20 (pricing valid while supplies last, additional fees apply), and the Symphony’s Soundcheck program offers $10 tickets to students in K-12, college and grad school.
About the Program
Mahler penned eight symphonies prior to Das Lied, but his sensitivity to the so-called “curse of the Ninth” – a superstition based on the fact that no major composer after Beethoven had completed nine works in the genre before death – led him to affix a descriptive title to the piece rather than numbering it as a symphony.
The work was completed in 1908 and followed a particularly tumultuous year during which the composer lost one of his daughters to scarlet fever, was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition and was forced to resign from his post as director of Vienna’s main opera house due to anti-Semitism.
Widely celebrated for redefining the scope and purpose of a symphony, Mahler broke even further new ground with Das Lied. Unlike the Western worldviews that define his preceding symphonies, the composer instead embraced Eastern influences in crafting the work, which reflected the widespread interest in Asian art at the time. This departure is particularly evident in the text of the piece, which Mahler adapted from seven selections contained in Die chinesische Flöte, an anthology of Chinese poetry that dates back to the Tang Dynasty. The resulting hybrid song-symphony explores youth, beauty, sorrow, longing and the mysteries of the eternal, all themes connected to the newfound sense of mortality Mahler was experiencing while composing Das Lied.
Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “our finest composer for the lyric stage,” Picker has garnered critical acclaim for his operas, which continue to be regularly performed around the world, and has made numerous contributions to both the concerto and symphonic genres as well.
Composed in 1983, The Encantadas was originally commissioned, in part, to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Albany Academy, a prep school that Herman Melville briefly attended as a boy. As a source of inspiration, the composer drew on Melville’s The Encantadas, a collection of 10 prose “sketches” depicting the Galápagos Islands, and chose to employ a narrator to read the author’s text over his music.
Melville’s use of alliteration in his book is mirrored throughout The Encantadas, with the title of each of the piece’s six movements starting with the letter D and the music itself beginning on the note of D. The overall shape of the work is presented as the recollections of an old man reflecting on his youthful adventures observing the striking features of the famed islands, and The Encantadas has since gone on to become one of Picker’s most widely performed scores.
Tickets for Mahler’s Das Lied may be purchased:
Online at NashvilleSymphony.org/DasLiedVia phone at 615.687.6400 At the Schermerhorn Symphony Center Box Office, One Symphony Place in downtown Nashville
Program notes, performer bios, a Spotify playlist and audio of Giancarlo Guerrero discussing the program, can be found at: https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/DasLied.
The GRAMMY® Award-winning Nashville Symphony has earned an international reputation for its innovative programming and its commitment to performing, recording and commissioning works by America’s leading composers. The Nashville Symphony has released 29 recordings on Naxos, which have received 24 GRAMMY® nominations and 13 GRAMMY® Awards, making it one of the most active recording orchestras in the country. The orchestra has also released recordings on Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and New West Records, among other labels. With more than 140 performances annually, the orchestra offers a broad range of classical, pops and jazz, and children’s concerts, while its extensive education and community engagement programs reach 60,000 children and adults each year.
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