Mahler: Symphony No. 7
Lucerne Festival 2024

“It is my best work, with a primarily cheerful character”. This was Gustav Mahler’s assessment of his Symphony No. 7, which was also highly regarded by Arnold Schoenberg, who said, “I had an impression of absolute peace based on artistic harmony. Something able to set me in motion without recklessly unsettling my center of gravity.”

Mahler created his very own musical world in his symphonies, a world that expresses extreme emotions and atmospheres. Beauty and morbidity, the grotesque and the trivial, the popular and the military, divine spheres and human abysses, love and death – all of this characterizes the 7th Symphony as well.

If one assumes that Mahler first composed the two “Nachtmusiken” and only then expanded the other movements around them into an entire symphony, then the “night” can be emphasized as a central theme of the Seventh Symphony, especially as Mahler also inserted a scherzo entitled “Schattenhaft” between the two “Nachtmusiken”.

“Riccardo Chailly is one of the most interesting interpreters of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic cosmos. His account of the Seventh Symphony shows a superior sense for the formal complexity and the significant contrasts of the work.”

In the idyllic summer setting of the Lucerne Festival, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra take their audience on an intense, rousing and emotionally moving concert experience. The concert evening is not only a tribute to Mahler’s genius, but also an expression of the artistic symbiosis between conductor and orchestra and a further milestone in their fruitful collaboration.