About this music:

This movement had been one of my favorite pieces by Gustav Mahler since a long time. I like very much the quiet mood, which is interrupted by some outbursts of emotion. Here, the quiet music which is prevalent over large parts, represents sometimes silent joy and happiness, but sometimes quiet desperation. The same with the loud outbursts: they indicate in some parts a very tragic desperation, in others a grandious joy. The positive mood is both in the beginning and in the end, indicating that this music has an overall optimistic attitude. A good title for this movement may be "Joy and Dispair".

About this recording:

I started creating a MIDI rendition of this movement back in 1996, but did not come very far, because of the length and the technical challenges posed by the instrumentation. In summer 2000 I decided to take up the challenge, abandoning the limits of standard MIDI and instead using the whole range of synths and soundfonts I had available at that time, leading to lots of layering to achieve a smootheness of sound. After 3 months of work I finished the first version of this recording in September 2000. Two more revisions followed using the same sound setup.

In April 2011 I revisited this rendition and began porting it to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. Edited a few mistakes, reworked the whole instrumental balance, and created a ndw tempo map - slightly slower than the previous version. This version 2.0 was ready on 19.September 2011 and is available here.