ADAGIETTO (score & parts)

Gustav Mahler wrote his Symphony No. 5 in 1901-02 whilst staying at his lakeside villa in southern Austria, where he worked in a ‘composing hut’. In 1901 Mahler was highly regarded: he was director of the Vienna Court Opera and the principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. His own music was also starting to be successful. Later in the year he met his wife-to-be, Alma Schindler, and in 1902 they were married and expecting their first child.

It is said that the symphony’s fourth movement – the breath-takingly beautiful Adagietto – was a love song to Alma. It is possibly Mahler’s most famous composition and is certainly the most frequently performed of his works. Its fame was further boosted by its use in Visconti’s film Death in Venice (1971) and is often played at commemorative events such the funeral Mass for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA.

Mahler scored the Adagietto for strings and harp, but it is sensitively arranged here (in a different key from the original) for wind quintet.

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