Mahler Project
"This is a brilliant recording. You can hear it from the first few bars: the amazing tension and brewing emotions that fan out and percolate throughout the performance."
-San Jose Mercury News
Mahler's Symphony No. 9
Recorded live at Davies Symphony Hall during the concerts on September 28-October 4, 2004, Mahler's last completed symphony covers territory from the amiable Austrian pastoral to the fury of its "Burleske" to the uninhibited baring, in the finale, of the unprotected heart.
Michael Tilson Thomas has distinguished himself as one of the world's foremost Mahler interpreters, and through his signature performances, as one of the composer's most compelling advocates. In 1974, at the age of 29, he made his SFS debut conducting Mahler's Symphony No. 9.
Press Quotes
"This is a most beautiful Ninth with playing of tremendous warmth and poise. Tilson Thomas confirms his credentials as a major Mahlerian, closing the cycle of completed symphonies with a reading of wonderful lightness and radiance. The recording, made in the SFS's own hall, beautifully captures the ensemble's personality, and, once again, the live experience only adds to the intensity of the music-making."
-Gramophone
"Michael Tilson Thomas's readings of these symphonies, made manifest in the orchestra's full-toned playing, offer a canny blend of impassioned emotional rhetoric and careful structural control... a beautiful account of the Ninth Symphony: urgent, capacious and bittersweet. It takes a proud place alongside its predecessors in this series."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"The San Francisco Symphony's Mahler project has already been trumpeted in music magazines as historic. If that's the case, the thousands of listeners who filled every seat in Davies Hall over the five days of the recording of Symphony No. 9 can consider themselves part of history. It was that good."
-Music in Concert
Release Date: April 12, 2005
BIN: 821936-0009-2-2