Olga Neuwirth György Ligeti Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler died before completing his Tenth Symphony, with the exception of its initial Adagio. Mahler had gone to Freud following a crisis, whose sublimely painful scars shine through the manuscript. After their meeting, Freud wrote: “It is as if a deep, one-of-a-kind trench had been dug through an ineffable edifice.” For the centennary of Mahler’s death, Olga Neuwirth received a commission, which she had to turn down at first due to prior commitments, but stayed on her mind: Masaot, which is Hebrew for “journey,” a tribute to Mahler, himself a Jew. In this meditation on the disappearance of time and memory, the Danube valley, home to a grandfather Mahler never met, becomes a singing carousel, the cradle of an impossible identity, a landscape replete with legacies. Coming in between, György Ligeti’s Concerto for Violin brings together a variety of influences and smelts them into something consistent: fractal geometry, Southeast Asian or Subsaharan African polyphonics and polyrhythmics, medieval techniques from Guillaume de Machaut, etc.