Beware, Gustav Mahler fans: a revolution is coming around the corner. (…)
In particular, the folk-like influences in the Fifth Symphony finally sound as they should—not like condescending quotations. Mahler’s music is allowed to shriek and screech, to squawk and sometimes even to fart. But it can also become overwhelmingly tender and fragile, as in the fourth movement, the Adagietto (…). “The foreign sounds familiar, the familiar seems foreign,” writes Jens Malte Fischer in his Mahler biography. Mahler, Fischer says, remains a “phenomenon with barbs.” These barbs become audible again with the Mahler Academy Orchestra, in a way that could well serve as a drastic cure for more polished Mahler interpretations—something for which Philipp von Steinaecker is particularly predestined, since he (…) knows traditional performance practice just as well as historically informed performance.