Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No.5 in D, Op.105 (Reformation)
Gustav Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Interval
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No.3

Vladimir Jurowski conductor
Sarah Connolly mezzo-soprano

Vladimir Jurowski conducts a contrasting programme of Romantic 19th century works by Mendelssohn, Mahler and Brahms.

Mahler came to set Friedrich Rückert's poems 'on the deaths of children' in 1901, six years before his own daughter would die from the same disease as Rückert's two children had. And the songs themselves seem an uncanny premonition - emotionally dumbfounded, frantically grief-stricken, touchingly affectionate but glowingly consolatory. Where words fail, this music speaks through gentle orchestration and a disarmingly honest voice, providing a haven of sleep amid the thrusting orchestral statements of Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony and the provocative fist-shaking of Brahms's Third Symphony.