hr-Sinfonieorchester

‘Mahler's soul sings its farewell!’ - There are many famous words like this about the 9th Symphony. And they often refer to farewell, the end, the abyss. This deeply moving work is an end point in sound - and at the same time a high point of the entire genre, of the era. ‘The orchestra is famous for its Mahler interpretations, and I will continue that,’ promised Alain Altinoglu in 2021 when he took up the post of Chief Conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Frenchman's Mahlerian approach is rich in detail, attentive to structure and crystallising colours. And in the Ninth, the colours are not exactly the brightest, naturally, because: This is not about failure in the pursuit of personal happiness, but about a failure of the world as a whole. It is not just Mahler the man who sees himself before the abyss, he sees humanity there - the Ninth as a universal requiem. Arnold Schönberg coined one of the winged words about this work: ‘It seems that the Ninth is a limit. If you want to go beyond it, you have to leave.’ Because: ‘Those who wrote a Ninth were too close to the hereafter.’ (hr-Sinfonieorchester)