Gustavo Dudamel & Deutsche Grammophon to Release Album with Berlin Philharmonic

Gustavo Dudamel, fresh from starting a 19-day residency at the Salzburg Festival with open rehearsals, special events, symposia and performances of Mahler's Symphonies Nos. 3, 7 and 8, as well as Mozart's Mass in C minor, has joined Deutsche Grammophon in announcing his debut album with the Berlin Philharmonic, set for global release in September. Gustavo Dudamel conducts Strauss's mighty Also sprach Zarathustra, the sonorous epic which will be forever associated with Stanley Kubrick's ground-breaking film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, alongside the tone poems Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, both significant landmarks in Strauss's development as a master of orchestral texture and form.

The recording was captured live during concerts beginning 2012/13 and continues the longest-running partnership in recorded music history. In 2013 Deutsche Grammophon and Berlin Philharmonic celebrate an incredible 100 years of working together.

Dudamel comments on the experience working with the Berlin Philharmonic:

"Performing Zarathustra with the Berlin Philharmonic has been an honor, first and foremost, as well as an amazing and unique challenge. Because as soon as you think of Zarathustra, you think of the Berlin Philharmonic, and of Karajan - there's a direct relationship between them. I think we've achieved something very special in our live recording, which I see as a key moment in my life - one of those peaks you dream of, something you might think was an impossible dream, but which then comes true."

Karajan's Strauss releases with the Berlin Philharmonic for DG are still numbered among the benchmark classical recordings of all time, peerless examples of instrumental virtuosity matched with sumptuous late-Romantic composition, and their 1981 all-Strauss recording was one of the first-ever CD release from any label. But rather than leaving Dudamel feeling overawed, it seems that the spirit of Karajan inspired him to explore Strauss's lavish harmonic extremes as well Zarathustra's profound philosophical undertones. For him, Zarathustra is about nothing less than "the power we all have inside ourselves, to dream and make our dreams come true. For me personally it's a kind of metaphor, a utopia."

Deutsche Grammophon President Mark Wilkinson sums up what the musicians have achieved together: "This is recorded music heaven - the orchestra has these works running through its veins, and Dudamel's dynamism and extraordinary energy make for an historic encounter."

The release also begins the Yellow Label's campaign to mark the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth in 2014.

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