Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Church and folk songs, patriotic chants, the noise of the crowd: Charles Ives repeatedly attempted to place moments of American (village) life within his elaborate soundscapes – sometimes nostalgically, sometimes ecstatically, and sometimes with joyful exuberance. His passionate desire for experimentation and adventure followed a higher goal not dissimilar to that of Gustav Mahler: creating an all-embracing musical world. With her familiar ethereal soprano Anna Prohaska presents a selection of Ives’s songs alongside early Mahler songs – in a “composed interpretation” arranged specially for her by her former teacher and fellow Berlin resident Eberhard Kloke, whose reviving and progressive transcriptions stand firmly in the tradition of Liszt and Busoni: “Each particular composition provides me with motivation and ideas to take that work further in a certain direction. Sometimes this process goes so far, that it in turn can be seen as composition,” is how Kloke describes his approach. The evening’s main symphonic work is Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, known by the title “From the New World,” and which the contemporary audience at its New York premiere felt was genuinely “American” music – even though here Dvořák unmistakably saw the new world through a Bohemian lens.