Konzerthausorchester Berlin

Mahler himself mentioned that the music of his 6th Symphony contained an enigma for his audiences. This is music combining intense emotions, irony and echoes of folk music fused into an explosive frenzy which at times appears to gain an intermittent enhanced clarity.


In “Eindrücke” by Luciano Berio, the musical worlds of marches and melodies hover within space like distant memories with a dreamlike quality. Berio would have been celebrating his 100th birthday this year; in this orchestral work dating from 1973, he reflects on two previously composed works which significantly also have German titles: “Bewegung” and Still”.


Luciano Berio succeeds in distributing musical events across a variety of imaginary spatial tonal levels in his orchestral work “Eindrücke”. The large-scale orchestral forces including piano and electric organ are subdivided into individual internal ensembles whose spatial ascent can be audibly differentiated.


Musical spatialisation also played a significant role for Gustav Mahler: in his Symphony No. 6, offstage cowbells create an extension of the soundscape. The utilisation of these instruments which “were to be played in a realistic imitation of the tinkling of a grazing herd of animals” was at the time of composition so unorthodox that the composer added subsequently deleted instructions in his conducting score that the bells were “to be used backstage in the theatre”.


The desired effect was however worlds away from ‘postcard romanticism’: Mahler considered the “natural sound” like a ”fading reverberation of the earth” as if “standing on the highest peak in the presence of eternity”, a moment of pure sublimity which cannot be separated from existential anxiety.


Luciano Berio (1925 – 2003)

Eindrücke (1973)

for orchestra


Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911)

Symphony No. 6 in A minor (1903–05)



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