The Mahler Academy Orchestra’s original project – Mahler: Symphony No. 9 on Period Instruments – sheds a completely new light on the performance practice of Mahler’s time. It is Exclusively Available in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 and DXD at NativeDSD

For this unique project, the young artists of the Gustav Mahler Academy came together with fifty-five musicians from Europe’s top orchestras under the direction of Philipp von Steinaecker in Toblach, where Mahler composed his last works.

Their performance on historical instruments reveal many new aspects of this music. To make the project possible, the Euregio Kulturzentrum Gustav Mahler Toblach Foundation has assembled a collection that meticulously reconstructs the instruments used by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra around 1900.

When the Ninth Symphony was premiered in 1912, a year after Mahler’s death, the music world wanted to consider it as his testament and farewell to life. The opening movement of the Ninth Symphony, like that of the Fourth, describes the human condition — although the philosophical generalizing tone of the Fourth has given way to an incredibly personal and biographically pointed narrative.

Mahler creates a wistful mood of great beauty from seemingly incoherent scraps of motifs for the beginning: the memory of a past before the catastrophe. In the long progression of the movement, however, this place of retreat for the soul is repeatedly overtaken by horrific reality; despite courageous struggles, it is overcome and perishes in devastating ruin.

Mahler Academy Orchestra 
Philipp von Steinaecker, Conductor