Reminder: Rattle/BPO M2 webcast this weekend

[Steele]

Just a reminder for anyone interested, this weekend brings the Rattle/BPO M2 concerts to Berlin.  The live webcast in the BPO Digital Concert Hall is tomorrow (10/30) at 8PM local time.  These are obviously the concerts that the previously announced future M2 release will come from.  For those who have never accessed the BPO Digitial Concert Hall, the video and audio are just fantastic (shameless plug - I have had season subscriptions the past two years).  Once the live concert has been completed, the performance will be available on demand in the site's concert archive.  A 24 hour pass to the site is about 10 euros as I recall, and a total bargain given all the additional concert content you can access during that time.  The email announcement follows:

Live on Saturday: Sir Simon Rattle
conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2

Sublimated resurrection   

Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony has a particular significance in the history of the Berliner Philharmoniker: Mahler himself gave the first performance of this work with this orchestra in 1895. Afterwards, he noted contentedly, “Everything was exceedingly successful. The performers were so enthralled and gripped that they found the right expression for everything themselves.” The symphony has also played a special role in the career of Sir Simon Rattle.

When Rattle’s recording of the work with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra first appeared in 1987, it was clear that a remarkable talent had come on the scene. The Gramophone magazine wrote at the time: “But where Simon Rattle’s interpretation is concerned, we must go into the realm of such giant Mahlerians as Walter and Klemperer, dissimilar as they were. For we are dealing here with conducting akin to genius, with insights and instincts that cannot be measured with any old yardstick.”

The symphony is a work full of power and life. Although it deals thematically with death and resurrection, it does so rather in an abstract, sublimated way. In contrast to this is the second work of the evening, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw from 1947. Here, death is given a concrete, almost unbearable form when a narrator gives a stark eyewitness account of the massacre in the Warsaw ghetto.

Before the concert itself, our video allows you to sit in at the dress rehearsal.

Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle  Conductor
Kate Royal  Soprano
Magdalena Kožená  Mezzo-Soprano
Hanns Zischler  Speaker
Rundfunkchor Berlin
Simon Halsey  Chorus Master

Arnold Schoenberg
A Survivor from Warsaw

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection”

Live webcast
Sat, 30 Oct, 8 pm (Berlin time)
> New York: 2 pm > Tokyo: Sun, 31 Oct, 3 am

 http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/1736?utm_medium=email&utm_source=EmailNewsletter&utm_content=153931825&utm_campaign=DCHNewsletterforthe301010&utm_term=Gotoconcert
 

[barry guerrero]

We'll all have to get this since it emanates from genius that can not be measured with any old yardstick   

[mahler09]

Is it free to watch?

[vvrinc]

...from genius that can not be measured with any old yardstick   

Correct. One needs a dipstick. 

[Alexandros]

Perhaps I will not dive further from the first 5 min to Rattle's yesterday's M2 from Berlin. I have so very limited experience with Rattle's Mahler and really was so badly surpised. Inexplicable raletandi, bad taste rubati, marches that are not marches: the perfect way to hate the work. Really I want to be patient and listen to the end. He must go somewhere. Or not?

[Fafner]

Havent's listened to this broadcast, but that's the impression I got a couple of months ago at Lucerne. That was Mahler's 1st. Rattle's view striked me as uninspired and at some places mannered. The orchestra was on a very bad form too (was much better the day after in another program).