Of Love, Death, and Beyond: Exploring Mahler's Resurrection Symphony

Leonard Bernstein performs three of his own compositions with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at the Philharmonic in Berlin.

To play Beethoven's music is to give oneself over completely to the child-spirit which lived in that grim, awkward, violent man. Without that utter submission it is impossible to play the Adagio of the Ninth. Or, Heaven knows, the first movement. And the Finale? Most of all! It is simply unplayable unless we go all the way with him, as he cries out "Brüder!" - Leonard Bernstein

Recordings of all the Beethoven symphonies with their chief conductor are always a milestone in the artistic work of the Berliner Philharmoniker. So it was with Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado, and expectations are correspondingly high for this cycle conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Where does the special status of these symphonies come from? Simon Rattle has an explanation: “One of the things Beethoven does is to give you a mirror into yourself – where you are now as a musician.” In fact, this music contains such a wealth of extreme emotions and brilliant compositional ideas that reveal the qualities of the orchestra and its conductor as if under a magnifying glass.

Home video featuring The London Philharmonic performing music from Dragon Quest IV: Michibikareshi Monotachi, conducted by composer Koichi Sugiyama.

Icelandic pop-star Paul Oscar joins with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra to give a performance during Covid19 lookdowns.

In 2005, the Staatsoper Berlin and its orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin under musical director Daniel Barenboim, celebrated a series of events to celebrate the 80th birthday of French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez. Artistically associated for decades with Barenboim and Berlin, Pierre Boulez is one of today's most distinguished composers and conductors. As part of the celebration, Boulez conducted a performance of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony at the Berlin Philharmonie. With his uncompromising approach to the score, Pierre Boulez's Mahler readings have long fascinated critics and audiences alike. Boulez eschews the romanticized readings common in performance tradition and, instead, reveals the real joy and terror in Mahler's large-scale symphonies.

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and his dramatic emergence as an original master. Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony help you make sense of this voyage into life as it really is.

This film speaks to the uniquely inherent traits that drummers and percussionists possess as natural explorers of music and sound, and how this particular story explores the challenge of translating foreign voices of percussive expression into the dialect of a Western classical orchestra setting. Five accomplished percussionists, Drum, and a rock star composer, Stewart Copeland, come together with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to create a groundbreaking work.

Here is the most convincing presentation of Brahms' symphonies that I personally have ever experienced. There is no explaining a gift like Leonard Bernstein, a true legend and one of the truly great ones of the 20th century (and a great Brahms conductor!). I have followed his career and recordings both at the NY Philharmonic and at Vienna (other places too). His brilliance and incandescence are revelatory in these Brahms performances. His view of a thorough-going romantic Brahms expressing his passionate control of an inner rage in classical form is convincing. He and this great Vienna orchestra give a consistent statement of it. And, of course, Bernstein's introductory comments are without peer.