Daniel Harding
Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Gustav Mahler
Blumine
Richard Wagner
Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 73
Blumine (or flower bouquet) is one of Mahler’s most inspired Andantes. Yet the composer chose to pluck this flower from the lush garden of his Symphony no. 1, Titan, where it was originally performed as the second movement. Lost for some eighty years, Blumine was rediscovered in 1966 and became a symphonic gem of dazzling beauty in its own right. Daniel Harding, newly appointed Music Director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, juxtaposes it with the most intimate of Brahms’s symphonies, the Second, which in this programme comes between the alpha and the omega of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, namely the Prelude and the death of the protagonist: the most powerful transfiguration ever imagined, where the music becomes an ocean of light.
