14 March 2021
Camilla Tilling, soprano
Mozart
Dudamel conducts Mahler
The Netherlands
Gustavo Dudamel returns to the Concertgebouworkest with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and the delightful overture to Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte.
A vision of heaven
After an absence of more than seven years, Gustavo Dudamel returns to the Concertgebouworkest. And how! For the first time, he will be leading the Amsterdam-based orchestra with its illustrious Mahler tradition in a symphony by Gustav Mahler. Relative to the rest of Mahler’s œuvre, the Symphony No. 4 is comparatively short, airy in tone and lightly scored, yet it is no less ambitious in its conception – the final movement, entitled Das himmlische Leben, is a childlike vision of heaven. It is sung in this performance by the Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling.
A leading conductor and advocate
Gustavo Dudamel is one of the megastars of the conducting world. Originally hailing from Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he would become the biggest talent to emerge from the Venezuelan music education project El Sistema. Dudamel is more than just a leading conductor, however. As chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, he is also an ardent advocate of the educational ideals of El Sistema which he puts into practice the world over.