Mahler: Song Cycles Alice Coote, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra & Marc Albrecht

• Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen:
• 1 No. 1, Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht 04:03
• 2 No. 2, Ging heut' morgen übers Feld 04:18
• 3 No. 3, Ich hab' ein glühend Messer 03:17
• 4 No. 4, Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz 05:25
• Rückert-Lieder:
• 5 No. 1, Ich atmet' einen linden Duft 02:40
• 6 No. 3, Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder 01:28
• 7 No. 2, Liebst du um Schönheit 02:09
• 8 No. 5, Um Mitternacht 06:05
• 9 No. 4, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen 06:33
• Kindertotenlieder:
• 10 No. 1, Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n 05:38
• 11 No. 2, Nun seh' ich wohl 04:47
• 12 No. 3, Wenn dein Mütterlein 04:46
• 13 No. 4, Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen 03:06
• 14 No. 5, In diesem Wetter 06:59
• Total Runtime 01:01:14

Info for Mahler: Song Cycles

Marc Albrecht conducts the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra with the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Alice Coote in a persuasive new recording of Mahler’s incomparable orchestral song cycles Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder and the Rückert-Lieder.

Richly lyrical, poignant and soul searching, Mahler’s orchestral songs deal with the familiar themes of love, life, resignation and loss, exquisitely realised on an orchestral canvas which combines haunting and compelling sonorities with strident, unsettling dissonances. While not as ambitious as his symphonies, they are as deeply-felt and often regarded as the key to the larger-scale works.

The eloquent sadness of the Kindertotenlieder is expressed though the rather bare orchestration and the entrancing use of solo instruments, culminating in a blissfully serene conclusion. With Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, the restless mood swings are matched with fluctuating, vividly textured orchestral colours. And for the most lyrical song cycle, the Rückert-Lieder, the delicately woven orchestral textures are ravishing in their effect, especially in the incomparable Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, a song of which Mahler said “It is truly me”.

“What makes Albrecht’s Mahler so unique? His approach has integrity, is intelligent and sensitive … Albrecht leads the Mahler that makes you love Mahler.” (NRC Handelsblad).

Marc Albrecht is Music Director of the Netherlands Philharmonic, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and the Dutch National Opera. Acclaimed for his interpretations of Wagner, Strauss and Mahler, as well as for his commitment to contemporary music, Albrecht is a regular guest at Europe’s most prestigious opera houses and orchestras.

The world renowned mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is acclaimed for her performances of Strauss, Mahler, Berlioz, Mozart, Handel and Bach; she performs throughout the UK, Europe and the US and has a busy recital schedule.

The Guardian noted “Alice Coote's many admirers will be grateful to have her performance in Mahler’s great song-symphony documented in a carefully made studio recording [for PENTATONE], for she has emerged over the past few years as one of the finest mezzo interpreters of Das Lied von der Erde around … exquisitely coloured; every word matters, and the sadness that pervades the mezzo songs in particular is conveyed without it ever becoming self-conscious or sentimental.”

Alice Coote, mezzo-soprano
Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
Marc Albrecht, conductor

Alice Coote
Renowned on the great recital, concert and opera stages of the world, Alice Coote's career has taken her from her beginnings in the north of England (born in Cheshire), singing in local festivals and playing Oboe in the Cheshire Youth Orchestra, to being regarded as one of the great artists of today.

She trained at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Northern College of Music and The National Opera Studio, receiving during this time the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize and the Brigitte Fassbaender Prize for Lieder Interpretation. The recital platform is central to her musical life. Alice performs throughout the UK, Europe and the US at the Wigmore Hall, the BBC Proms, the Concertgebouw, the Lincoln Centre and the Carnegie Hall, among many other prestigious venues. Recently, she has performed Schubert's Winterreise in Chicago and Frankfurt and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Amsterdam and with the London Philharmonia. Judith Weir's The Voice of Desire was written for her. She toured Europe in La Clemenza di Tito with Louis Langrée and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and is currently a BBC Proms resident artist, where she has performed with Julius Drake, the London Philharmonic and the Apostles with the Hallé Orchestra. Acclaimed in particular for Mahler, Berlioz, Mozart, Händel and Bach with orchestras such as London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Radio Symphony, Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Netherlands Philharmonic, Concert D'Astrée, Hallé and Concertgebouw, and has collaborated with conductors including Gergiev, Dohnanyi, Belohavek, Elder and Boulez.

Coote spends a large part of her time engaged in the UK and abroad interpreting male and female roles, such as Dejaneira Hercules, Prince Charming Cendrillon, Carmen, Charlotte Werther, Dorabella Così fan Tutte, Lucretia The Rape of Lucretia, Marguerite Damnation de Faust, Penelope Ulysses, Octavian Der Rosenkavalier, Composer Ariadne, Orfeo, Idamante Idomeneo, Poppea as well as Nerone L’incoronazione di Poppea, Hansel, Sesto La Clemenza di Tito, Sesto Giulio Cesare, Maffio Orsini Lucretia Borgia, Ruggiero Alcina and Ariodante. She has performed these roles at Opera North, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, English National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House. In Europe she has appeared at the Opéra de Paris and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in Amsterdam, Geneva, Munich, Frankfurt and Salzburg. US appearances include the Chicago Lyric Opera, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto and the Met.

Recent engagements include Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Rückertlieder with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Les nuits d'été with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, various recitals across Europe and a return to the Hyperion recording studios for an album of French songs with Graham Johnson.

Highlights of her operatic calendar in 2012/13 include Leonore La Favorite at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Sesto Giulio Cesare at New York’s Met and Nicklausse/the Muse The Tales of Hoffmann at San Francisco Opera.

Burkhard Fritz
was born in 1970 and studied at the Johannes Brahms Conservatory in his native Hamburg. He attended the master class of Alfredo Kraus and from 2000 to 2006 pursued further studies with Arturo Sergi. After his first permanent engagement, with the Bremerhaven Stadttheater, he was until 2004 a member of the ensemble of the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen, where he sang numerous lyric rôles, with Max in Der Freischütz and Parsifal, achieving great success as Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. He was a guest artist with the Aalto Theater in Essen in rôles including Florestan, and with the Oldenburg Staatstheater he sang the title rôle in Idomeneo. Since the 2004/05 season he has been a permanent member of the ensemble of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, where he sang Parsifal under the baton of Daniel Barenboim as well as Florestan, Dimitri in Boris Godunov, Cavaradossi, and Alvaro in La forza del destino. Guest engagements have taken him to the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck and the Hanover Staatsoper, and in Rotterdam and Amsterdam he sang Faust in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust under Valery Gergiev. He made his Vienna Staatsoper début in 2006 as Parsifal. In concert he has appeared in, among other works, Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder in Stuttgart and in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Daniel Barenboim.

The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
gives more than 40 concerts per season in the Grote Zaal of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, in other Dutch concert halls and during international tours. Almost 200,000 audience members attend performances of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra each year; this number includes the audiences for the two orchestras’ opera performances. As of the start of the season 2011/2012, Marc Albrecht will be the chief conductor of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra.



It was in 1985 that the musicians of three existing orchestras combined their musical qualities and experience to form the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Under the direction of its chief conductors Hartmut Haenchen (1985-2003) and Yakov Kreizberg (2004-2011), the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra has gained an excellent reputation in the international musical world, winning a large and broadly-constituted audience in the process. The NedPhO also plays a pioneering role in its search for new audiences and young talent; in this it continues the tradition that was inaugurated by conductor Anton Kersjes (‘Dirigent van Amsterdam’, 1923-2004), chief conductor of the former Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. 



Since its founding the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra have performed in the majority of operas presented by De Nederlandse Opera in Het Muziektheater Amsterdam; they have therefore contributed in no small manner to the house’s international renown. With more than 130 players the NedPhO is able to organise and provide successful performances of the largest orchestral projects, these including the much-lauded DNO production of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen (1999, revivals in 2005 and 2012-13) and the Holland Festival production of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (2000).

The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra’s high international profile guarantees that it is regularly invited to perform abroad. The orchestra made a successful tour of the important German concert halls under Yakov Kreizberg in 2009 and also gave two sold-out concerts in the series Orquestas y Solistas del Mundo in the Auditorio Nacional de Musica in Madrid. The NedPhO also made a well-received debut with soloist Julia Fischer at the BBC Proms in London in 2008.

Marc Albrecht
is chief conductor of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. At the same time he is Chief Conductor of De Nederlandse Opera; his double function strengthens the already close collaboration between the two organisations.

At an age when other children were still playing with wooden swords, Marc Albrecht (1964, Germany) was already waving a conductor’s baton. He was still a teenager when he began to assist his father, conductor George Alexander Albrecht, in rehearsals of operas by Richard Strauss and Wagner.

Albrecht continued the apprentice years begun with his father as a repetiteur with the Hamburg opera, playing formidably difficult opera scores on the piano as he accompanied singers as they prepared their roles. An amazing training, by any account. The young conductor developed his talent further in the Dresden Semperoper and as personal assistant to Claudio Abbado with the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra in Vienna. Highly successful years with the Darmstadt opera began for him in 1995; he himself says that ‘I breathed in opera scores, I was unstoppable. The groundwork that I laid there provides me now with an incredibly comfortable feeling’.

Albrecht decided to concentrate on symphonic repertoire for a period in 2006 and accepted a position with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg. He rapidly gained a reputation as a symphonic conductor also and invitations to work with the best orchestras in Europe quickly followed: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, Munich Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony and the Orchestre National de Lyon. Albrecht’s operatic career had nevertheless continued to progress: the best proof of that is possibly the immense success that he enjoyed with Richard Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten with De Nederlandse Opera and with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra in the pit in 2008. 'He and the orchestra were the triumphant stars of the night', wrote Opera Today, going on to predict a great future for him. The following year he made a highly successful debut with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer.

Albrecht is chief conductor of both the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and De Nederlandse Opera since September 2011, the successor to Yakov Kreizberg and Ingo Metzmacher respectively. The Dutch press described this as the best possible nomination, an opinion in which we can only concur. And Albrecht himself? He was so delighted with his appointment that he immediately packed his bags and came to Amsterdam, where he now lives.

Booklet for Mahler: Song Cycles