Gustav Mahler said that a symphony should encompass the world, and he perhaps never cast his net more widely than with Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), a vocal symphony setting Chinese texts of the Tang Dynasty. The texts passed through French and several German translations before landing with Mahler, but he succeeded in creating something truly exotic, with pentatonic scales and other chinoiseries , that suggests a transcendent quality much on the troubled Mahler's mind. Here, Das Lied von der Erde is ...
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Gustav Mahler said that a symphony should encompass the world, and he perhaps never cast his net more widely than with Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), a vocal symphony setting Chinese texts of the Tang Dynasty. The texts passed through French and several German translations before landing with Mahler, but he succeeded in creating something truly exotic, with pentatonic scales and other chinoiseries , that suggests a transcendent quality much on the troubled Mahler's mind. Here, Das Lied von der Erde is paired with a setting of the same texts, in Mandarin, rearranged but ending with the same ones, by contemporary Chinese composer Xiaogang Ye. Considering the growing popularity of Western symphonic music in China, it's a bit surprising that nobody has attempted something like this before, but this outing avoids obvious solutions and is quite absorbing. It's notable that Ye, partly trained in the West, generally does not attempt a Chinese-sounding score. Instead, he takes the...
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