Mahler’s Fourth

For several seasons, Gustavo Gimeno has been chief conductor of the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra; he has also guest-conducted ensembles including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He will now appear with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra with soloist Lisa Larsson, a soprano whose flexible voice spans an uncommonly broad repertoire. She has sung on stages such as La Scala and the Royal Opera House in London, and with conductors including Claudio Abbado and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Ich denke Dein... from 2014, by Rolf Martinsson, was the result of a close collaboration between the composer and Lisa Larsson. The piece consists of poems by Goethe, Eichendorff and Rilke set to music, with the common theme of love. These texts, according to Martinsson, are already filled with music. In the orchestra, the vibraphone, harp, piano and celesta play especially important roles.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 is a sunny orchestral work with ringing bells and occasionally rustic string sections. Mahler wrote to a friend that he had many ideas for beautiful titles for the movements, but because he did not want the critics to misunderstand him, he kept them to himself. For the scherzo, however, we have a clue from his wife Alma, who wrote that while Gustav was composing the movement, he was enchanted by Arnold Böcklin’s self-portrait, in which death plays the fiddle in the artist’s ear.