Riccardo Frizza

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Alessandro Solbiati is a composer very active in transcription as well, as he shows in the Six Early Lieder for female voice and orchestra, after Arnold Schoenberg’s original version for voice and piano. It is an orchestration of six Lieder selected from the thirty-two, without opus number, that Schoenberg wrote between 1893 and 1899, which reflect a path of stylistic refinement — divided between Brahmsian models and a chromaticism of Wagnerian descent — directed towards the building of a personal identity. Solbiati, who presented this work in Bologna in 2013 as part of the «Schoenberg Experience», shapes the transcription in the sign of a visionary expressiveness, carving onto the original a writing of dreamlike character in a process of perpetual transformation of timbre.

The trumpet fanfare that opens Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is no ordinary beginning: it is an evocation of the composer’s childhood, a distant echo of the barracks and of the soldiers marching past his parents’ house in Bohemia. The Fifth was composed between 1901 and 1902, in the middle of a decisive turn: in November 1901 Mahler met the daughter of a Viennese painter, the fatal Alma Schindler («the most beautiful woman in Vienna», they said), whom he married in March of the following year. The fame of this symphony has been fed by the cinema, thanks to Luchino Visconti’s masterly use of the Adagietto in Death in Venice and to the recent film Tár, with Cate Blanchett sublime as a conductor obsessed with the Fifth. Bruno Walter, perhaps the conductor who knew Mahler’s world most closely, gave the best description of the symphony: «music that is passionate, wild, full of pathos, lively, solemn, tender and filled with every sensation of the human soul».