Recursive Classics Announces Release Of Mahler Symphony No. 5 With The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and David Bernard

Recursive Classics has announced the upcoming release of Mahler's Symphony No. 5, featuring David Bernard leading the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony. This album will be available on December 2nd, 2022 at all major retailers, download sites and streaming services.

Mahler's Fifth represents this intersection of two important changes in the composer's conception of the symphony. First, unlike in his earlier set of Wunderhorn symphonies that telegraph context and meaning through embedded text or quotations of songs with related text, in the Fifth, Mahler leaves us without an explicit word-music connection. Second, through the Fifth, Mahler realizes his vision for a new symphonic style that focuses on contrapuntal transparency.

"In conceiving his Fifth Symphony, Mahler was absolutely obsessed with the horizontal dimension and contrapuntal transparency," says Conductor David Bernard. "The proximity of the genesis of the Fifth and Mahler's deep dive into the works of Johann Sebastian Bach may have been the catalyst for this new style-a style that pervades the work on both the micro-level-featuring pronounced linear voicing crafted and propelled through careful succession of consonance and dissonance, and on the macro-level-featuring flamboyant contrapuntal episodes and a finale that brings a tour-de-force display of Mahler's own 'Grand Style'-evoking Mozart's similar display of contrapuntal prowess in the Finale of his "Jupiter" Symphony."

Mahler's obsession with the new style in the Fifth lasted well beyond the initial completion of the work, through a decades-long series of modifications to improve transparency of the voice leading. "The fusion of Mahler's brilliant, passionate, lyrical and intense narratives with a compositional rhetoric focused on contrapuntal transparency requires a distinct approach," says Bernard. "Without words, even implied words, to guide us, the music must speak for itself-in a language markedly different than Mahler's previous symphonies."

The release date is December 2, 2022. Use this link - https://orcd.co/pacsmahler5 - to pre-add this album to your streaming playlists and to pre-order the CD. For more information, please visit www.davidbernard.com and www.chambersymphony.com.

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