Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra / Kent Nagano

Bringing Gustav Mahler’s »Das Lied von der Erde« to the stage always takes us on a path down into the depths of late-Romantic turn-of-the-century aesthetics. Of course it is poetry that forms the foundation of the work – albeit thoroughly dubious due to the fact that the words have been translated back and forth so many times from the Old Chinese. So the six songs, the last of which is by far the most weighty, therefore do indeed need to be read primarily in terms of the music and regarded as Mahler’s unofficial Ninth Symphony, as it were. He did allude himself to this way of looking at the work – and also stressed that »Das Lied von der Erde« was »probably the most personal thing ... I have done so far.«