Czech Philharmonic • Gustav Mahler

In recognition of the 2024 Year of Czech Music – a major celebration of Czech music celebrated across the Czech Republic every 10 years since 1924 – Chief Conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov has put the music of Antonín Dvořák at the centre of his programmes with the Czech Philharmonic throughout the 2023–2024 season. In addition to conducting three programmes devoted to Dvořák in Prague, Bychkov and the Orchestra will tour the Dvořák programmes to South Korea, Japan, Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium and the United States, as well as recording the last three symphonies for Pentatone. 

Semyon Bychkovʼs tenure at the Czech Philharmonic began in 2018 with concerts in Prague, London, New York, and Washington commemorating the 100th anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. Following the culmination of The Tchaikovsky Project, Bychkov and the Orchestra began their focus on Mahler. The first discs in a new Mahler cycle were released by Pentatone in 2022, with Symphony No. 5 chosen by The Sunday Times as its Best Classical Album.

Bychkovʼs repertoire spans four centuries. His highly anticipated performances are a unique combination of innate musicality and rigorous Russian pedagogy. In addition to guest engagements with the world’s major orchestras and opera houses, Bychkov holds honorary titles with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with whom he appears annually at the BBC Proms – and the Royal Academy of Music, who recently awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. Bychkov was named “Conductor of the Year” by the International Opera Awards in 2015 and, by Musical America in 2022.

Bychkov began recording in 1986 and released discs with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Philharmonic for Philips. Subsequently a series of benchmark recordings with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne featured Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Strauss, Verdi, Glanert and Höller. Bychkov’s 1993 recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with the Orchestre de Paris continues to win awards, most recently the Gramophone Collection 2021; Wagner’s Lohengrin was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Year (2010); and Schmidt’s Symphony No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic was BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Month (2018).

In common with the Czech Philharmonic, Bychkov has one foot firmly in the culture of the East and the other in the West. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory with the legendary Ilya Musin. Denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic, Bychkov emigrated to the United States in 1975 and, has lived in Europe since the mid-1980’s. In 1989, the same year he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, Bychkov returned to the former Soviet Union as the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor. He was appointed Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra (1997) and Chief Conductor of Dresden Semperoper (1998).

Beginning in 1908, Gustav Mahler was living in New York—he was the chief conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and later of the newly established New York Philharmonic as well. Nonetheless, Austria was still the place where he felt truly at home. Mahler rented an isolated house not far from the Tyrolean village Toblach, where he conceived his Ninth Symphony during the three summer months of 1909. He wrote out a continuous draft there, then he finished the orchestration back in New York. Mahler, like Beethoven, Bruckner, and Dvořák, was not able to escape the “curse” of going past nine symphonies, although he attempted to do by not numbering Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony, just in case.

Mahler was gravely ill by then, and he did not live to hear his Ninth. Bruno Walter led the Vienna Philharmonic in the symphony’s premiere in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein on 26 June 1912, the year after the composer’s death. The adherents of the Viennese avant-garde immediately grasped the work. Alban Berg called it the most beautiful thing that Mahler had ever written, and Arnold Schoenberg regarded the symphony as transcendent: “It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece. This symphony is no longer couched in the personal tone. It consists, so to speak, of objective, almost passionless statements of a beauty which becomes perceptible only to one who can dispense with animal warmth and feels at home in spiritual coolness. [...] It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too near to the hereafter. Perhaps the riddles of this world would be solved, if one of those who knew them were to write a Tenth. And that probably is not to take place”, said Schoenberg in a Prague lecture about Mahler in 1912. The Prague premiere of the symphony took place on 6 November 1918 with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Otakar Ostrčil, a devoted interpreter of Mahler’s legacy. Another devotee was Alexander Zemlinsky, who led the work on 14 January 1923 with the orchestra of the New German Theatre and several more times in the 1930s with the Czech Philharmonic as a guest conductor.

Unlike the preceding Eighth Symphony or Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony employs purely instrumental forces—a large orchestra with many wind and percussion instruments. The four movements have little to do with the classical symphonic form, including their peculiar sequence of keys (D major, C major, A minor, D flat major). The long, slow outer movements form an ideological and philosophical centre of gravity, and the pair of movements in their midst provide the maximum conceivable contrast with their deliberate vulgarity and grotesqueness. The scherzo movement is to be played “at the tempo of a leisurely ländler” and “rather clumsily and very coarsely”, and it has been likened to a dance of death. The third movement is subtitled “Rondo. Burleske” and is to be played “very defiantly”. Mahler dedicated it “to my brothers in Apollo”. Here, the revelry stands above an abyss, and we are treated to a feast of Mahler’s legendary orchestral artistry. However, the meditative culmination of the colossal 80-minute work is characteristically entrusted just to the intimate sound of the strings playing at the softest dynamics, fading away to nothingness and breaking all bonds with earthly life.