Musical Event at the Radio Hall
Friday, 7 May 2010 , 19.00

For the 150-year celebration of Gustav Mahler’s birth, the Radio Orchestras and Choirs invite the audience to a grand concert, in which the Symphony No. 2Resurrection will be performed, a work that has not been played in the ‘Mihail Jora’ Studio since 2003. The National Radio Orchestra will be conducted by Jin Wang, an artist who, a few days ago, enjoyed a great triumph alongside this ensemble on the stage of the Banat Philharmonic, at the opening of the ‘Musical Timişoara’ International Festival. The participants in the concert will be Marta Cristina Sandu (Soprano), Aura Twarowska (Alto) and the Academic Radio Choir prepared by conductor Dan Mihai Goia.

Mahler composed the Symphony No. 2 between 1888 and 1894 while spending his summers on the bank of Lake Attersee, near Salzburg. He never sought to revolutionize music or create a new language; on the contrary, he wanted to ‘spiritualize’ music. Every musical feature of the future can be found in Mahler’s works: the new polyphonic freedom, the orchestration that transforms the tone into a parameter of musical composition, accumulative manoeuvring of the material inherited from the past, elimination of literal reprises, almost entire abolition of the sonata form which characterizes particularly his last works of ‘perpetual recurrence of the same variation’ (Adorno), favourable to a progressive process.

The same Adorno compared Mahler’s Symphony to a novel which alternates different episodes and often times unexpected adventures, instead of developing unknown materials and following a pre-set scheme. The tensions, ruptures, conflicts reflected in his music are belong to our time, as do the suppression of barriers between genres and styles, the burst of forms, and the collapse of traditional values. In this respect, Mahler is one of the main actors of a spiritual revolution whose persistent theatre stage was the Vienna of the beginning of the century.

Jin Wang, the conductor, whose record is of over 600 concerts performed at the music rack of several notorious European orchestras, such as the radio symphony orchestras of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Toscanini Philharmonic Orchestra (Italy), the Prague Symphony Orchestra (FOK), the philharmonic orchestras of Helsinki, Bergen, Stockholm, as well as at the music rack of national orchestras of Taiwan, China, Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc.

The concerts or the opera performances conducted by Jin Wang have always given way to enthusiastic comments of the unusually huge numbered audience, musicians he worked together with and of the specialized press. Composition is another aspect of his activity– the Suites Tibet Impressions or recent works like Nokia Variations, Würzburg Night-watchman, and Song from the Roof of the World capture not only the European audience, but also others.