Thu, 8. 2. 2024, 19.00 hrs

A4 MAHLER 5

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

Next year’s anniversary of the Year of Czech Music is a good opportunity to celebrate the Czech-born Gustav Mahler. Few people today would consider him a genuinely Czech composer if only because Mahler himself, born in the small village of Kaliště on the Bohemian-Moravian border, always considered himself to be more of a German. Nonetheless his personal and professional ties to the Czech lands were strong. 

In tonight’s concert we hear his Fifth Symphony, a monumental work bursting with imagination and richly coloured orchestral motifs depicting the apotheosis of life and nature. 

The work was written from 1901–02 at the composer’s holiday cottage at Maiernigg on the banks of the Wörthersee, with several revisions in the following years. Musicologists have put forward many different theories about the symphony’s programmatic structure and, indeed, whether it has any structure to speak of at all. One view is that it represents the retrospective vision of an individual’s life against the passage of time. The opening funeral march gives way to a stormy contemplation of the inner trials and tribulations of life, followed by a central section reflecting the complexity and excitement of new discoveries on life’s journey.

The main hero, forever looking back, experiences his first taste of falling in love in the dreamlike sequence of the Adagietto, a moment of blissful serenity. The finale, in the most consummate innocence, digs back further perhaps even to a childhood overflowing with diverse musicality, curiosity and opportunity.

Wielding the baton in tonight’s concert is our Orchestra’s Chief Conductor Robert Kružík.