The Mahler series of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome continues in 2011 with the following concerts

Orchestra e coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, conducted by Antonio Pappano

January 2011
Sat 8 | Mon 10 | Tues 11
Symphony No. 6

March 2011
Sat 12 | Mon 14 | Tues 15
Symphony No. 1

April 2011
Sat 2 | Mon 4 | Tues 5
Symphony No. 9

October 2011
Sat 22 | Sun 23 | Mon 24

with the China National Chorus and soloists Manuela Uhl, Christine Brewer, Meagan Miller, Sara Mingardo, Maria Radner, Nikolai Schukoff, Christopher Maltman, Georg Zeppenfeld
Symphony No. 8

November 2011
Sat 12 | Mon 14 | Tues 15
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
Symphony No. 7

In addition, further concerts will be given by the Mariinsky Orchestra together with the Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, conducted by Valery Gergiev:

10 November 2011
Symphony No. 9

11 November 2011
Symphony No. 4

View the full Mahler brochure

“What Mahler wrote is so clear that it is nearly impossible to move away from it.”

Maestro, do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Gergiev: I remember it very vaguely. It was the 1^st Symphony. Obviously, I was a very, very young man, but I remember this final movement when the horn section suddenly stands up and continues to play while standing. It’s a very powerful statement of lust in this symphony. That was very memorable. I don’t think that it is now my favorite memory of all the symphonies that Mahler composed, but it was my first one. That was a long time ago and of course it was also a long time before I started to look at Mahler’s symphonies – although when I was preparing to participate in the Herbert von Karajan Competition for young conductors, I saw that Mahler’s 1^st Symphony was proposed for young conductors to prepare. This means that if you prepare it, you could be asked to conduct the second movement, part of the finale, part of the first movement or just a couple of tempo transitions at the end – they don’t give you the entire symphony to conduct. So you have to know it and I knowingly started to study the symphony and played it for myself, if not to get to the heart of it, then to be able to conduct it, should I be given the chance to conduct it in the second round of the competition. This symphony was not for the first round, the beginning of the competition was very classical. I remember conducting maybe Beethoven’s 2^nd Symphony – the repertoire was very classical. Somehow I got into the second round and then into the third and then I got to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic which was a dream come true for a young man like me.

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