Synopsis
As far as anniversary gifts go, the one Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg received in 1920 was pretty spectacular. To celebrate his 25th year as Music Director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, they staged a special month-long festival in honor of one of Mengelberg’s favorite composers — Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer of monumental symphonies, who had, in fact, conducted the Concertgebouw several times before his untimely death at 50 in 1911.
Mahler was the conductor Mengelberg admired most, and Mengelberg and his orchestra were ardent champions of Mahler’s symphonies, too: their 1920 festival performed all nine of them over the course of two weeks that May.
Mahler’s widow Alma was in attendance, as were his younger Austrian contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, Danish composer Carl Nielsen and a young British conductor and Mahler fan named Adrian Boult, who reported on the festival for a British newspaper back home.
In 1995, the Concertgebouw staged another Mahler Festival on the 75th anniversary of the 1920 one, this time inviting the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic to participate. A hundredth-anniversary festival was planned for May 2020, but the COVID pandemic forced that Mahler cycle to be postponed until May 2025. Good things come to all who wait.
Music Played in Today's Program
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 1 (Titan); Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, conductor; London/Decca 448813
On This Day
Births
1915 - American composer George Perle, in Bayonne, New Jersey
1918 - Canadian composer Godfrey Ridout, in Toronto
Deaths
1667 - (on May 6 or 7) German composer and keyboard player Johann Jakob Froberger, 50, in Hericourt, nearr Montbeliard, France
Premieres
1897 - Leoncavallo: opera La Boheme in Venice
1981 - Rautavaara: Double-bass Concerto (Angel of Dusk), in Helsinki, with bassist Olli Kosonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony, Leif Segerstam conducting
1985 - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players, by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
1992 - Libby Larsen: Symphony No. 3 (Lyric), by the Albany Symphony (New York), Joel Revzen conducting
1999 - Magnus Lindberg: Cello Concerto, by the Orchestre de Paris, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Anssi Karttunen the soloist
1999 - Christopher Rouse: Seeing (Piano Concerto), at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Emanuel Ax the soloist
Others
1872 - Theodore Thomas conducts the first concert of the Cincinnati Music Festival (May Festival). His program includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, a Mozart aria, and a chorus from Haydn’s Creation.
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About Composers Datebook®
Host John Birge presents a daily snapshot of composers past and present, with timely information, intriguing musical events and appropriate, accessible music related to each.
He has been hosting, producing and performing classical music for more than 25 years. Since 1997, he has been hosting on Minnesota Public Radio's Classical Music Service. He played French horn for the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra and performed with them on their centennial tour of Europe in 1995. He was trained at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music and Interlochen Arts Academy.