Dimitri Mitropoulos' "Burial", played by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Constantinos Carydis. Recorded live on 22.09.2023 at the Kölner Philharmonie.
Dimitri Mitropoulos - Burial
WDR Symphony Orchestra
Constantinos Carydis, conductor
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Introduction to the work:
One of the legendary recordings of Gustav Mahler's 6th Symphony is one by the WDR Symphony Orchestra, recorded on August 31, 1959 in the Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal of the Funkhaus on Wallrafplatz. Dimitri Mitropoulos was the sound magician on the conductor's podium. This musical encounter was characterized by mutual appreciation, as Mitropoulos had already conducted at the Cologne broadcasting hall several times in the 1950s. And the range of the repertoire was as diverse as his conducting personality itself: Mendelssohn and Couperin, Prokofiev and Berlioz (the Requiem!), Gunther Schuller and Richard Strauss, Schönberg and Debussy. The year before his memorable Mahler interpretation in Cologne, Mitropoulos had handed over his chief position at the New York Philharmonic to Leonard Bernstein. Another year later, on October 31, 1960, he returned to the then Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra with Mahler. The performance of the Third Symphony was to become his legacy: Two days later, during a rehearsal of the same work at La Scala in Milan, he suffered a heart attack and collapsed dead.
Mahler and Bernstein are regarded as exceptional talents who achieved great things both as composers and conductors. However, it is hardly known that Mitropoulos was also an ingenious composer. But here he was a high-flyer. At the age of just 19, he composed his great orchestral dirge "Burial". Early modern music that reaches out into the past, for example to Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale prelude "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659, which exudes a similar aura of sound in the orchestral arrangement by Ottorino Respighi. Mitropoulos himself had set Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542 for orchestra as a 16-year-old, and some of his compositions also refer to the Baroque, such as a Concerto Grosso from 1929. But "Burial" also seems to point to the future, for example to the first movement of Henryk Górecki's 3rd Symphony ("Symphony of Lamentations"). All in all, a remarkably emotionally intense display of talent from the young Dimitri Mitropoulos.
(Text: Otto Hagedorn)