The stunning new recording by one of the undisputed contemporary Mahlerians,Ivan Fischer.
The Ninth Symphony was the last score completed by Mahler, and it could well be that this was how he originally meant it to be. With Beethovens Ninth and the unfinished Ninth by Bruckner in the back of his mind, he was deeply superstitious about symphonies and the number nine. At least, that is what his wife Alma had to say. But did he really intend the work to be nothing less than a farewell to life, as the moving final movement seems to suggest? And as it has so often been interpreted by Mahler specialists?
According to the conductor Leonard Bernstein, the last pages of the symphony are the most musically realistic description of death itself.
