Mahler: 10th Symphony: Adagio & Youth’s Magic Horn

Mahler: 10th Symphony: Adagio & Youth’s Magic Horn

Pierre Boulez conducts the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Adagio from Mahler's Symphony No. 10 and the song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Soloists are Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano) and Christian Gerhaher (baritone). This concert was recorded at the orchestras home base, Severance Hall, in February 2010. Among Mahler's orchestral songs, those of Des Knaben Wunderhorn occupy a special position: written in the 1890s, they are of ground-breaking importance in his oeuvre, since they helped establish a genre that had few precedents before him. Moreover, they also served as sources of inspiration, both musical and poetic, for the symphonies he wrote during this time. Mahler famously said a symphony should take in the entire world. He’d be pleased, then, by this performance of the “Adagio” from the unfinished Symphony No. 10, which somehow packed the world into a single movement.