About this recording:

I heard this music for the first time in a live concert in March 1986 in Hamburg, but I do not recall who was the conductor or the orchestra. It did not leave any impression in me: thie 9th Symphony was the very first music by Gustav Mahler I ever heard, and I had not anticipated what to expect - all those slow movements (first and last) did somewhat underwhelm me, as I had expected to hear a more conventional symphony.

But a few years later, I became more familiar with Mahler's earlier works, and I finally began understanding his symphonic language. In the 1990s I bought a CD with that famous iconic recording from January 1938: Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic. Until July 2011, this has been the only version of this work I was familiar with. Then I heard Roger Norrington's much discussed performance of this symphony at the BBC Proms 2011. While at my first listen on the radio I was also a bit underwhelmed, I then started to appreciate his performance when watching it on TV. And I decided that this Norringtonian approach (pure plain sound, "no vibrato") is to some extent similar to the one I am able to produce with my computer-controlled orchestra samples. So I decided to give it a try and to create a rendition of the last movement.