Mahler & Ye - The Song of the Earth

The Guardian 0

Michelle DeYoung/Brian Jagde/Liping Zhang/Shenyang/Shanghai SO/Long Yu
(Deutsche Grammophon, two CDs)
Xiaogang Ye sets the Tang-era Chinese poems that ultimately inspired Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde to colourful new music

The texts that Mahler used for Das Lied von der Erde, his great song-symphony, came to him third-hand. The German words he set had been translated from the French, which was in turn versions of poems from the golden age of Chinese literature during the Tang dynasty (AD618-907). The convoluted process took them very far from the much more concise originals, and in 2005 the conductor Long Yu asked the composer Xiaogang Ye for an orchestral song cycle using the Chinese versions of the texts that Mahler set; he compares and contrasts the two works on this recording with the Shanghai Symphony.