Gustav Mahler: Urlicht | Ruby Hughes & Manchester Collective

‘Urlicht’ (‘Primordial Light’) starts gently and solemnly - before building towards a truly transcendent finale. Taken from Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, it follows someone on their deathbed as they defy an angel to be reborn in heaven.
In soprano Ruby Hughes’ words, this is “the Mahlerian version of ‘what’s going to happen when I die?’ It’s reflective and it’s hopeful but it’s not exultant.”
Like the other songs on her first collaborative record with Manchester Collective, it offers a source of comfort - even in the face of mortality.
Listen to and stream End of My Days: bisrecords.lnk...
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Soprano - Ruby Hughes
Violin - Rakhi Singh, Donald Grant
Viola - Ruth Gibson
Cello - Nick Trygstad
Film - Jessie Rodger
Recorded at Stoller Hall in Manchester, February 2021
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[@johnhardy8452]

Such an insightful and luminous version of this song - part of Des Knaben Wunderhorn before it was brought into a very different, more epic and structural role in the huge Second Symphony.
Beautifully performed, recorded, filmed and edited, thank you. It must have existed in a version something like this when Mahler was sketching - he never went straight to full orchestral score.
I have very deep personal connections with this.
One is that through an extraordinary chance it was chosen to edit a crucial night trench montage scene to in the Welsh language film Hedd Wyn [Oscar nominated 1994] which meant that all the rest of the original score had to reflect it and respond to it.
The budget was tight and time was short. When the mezzo Soprano Penelope Walker arrived at the Cardiff Studio in her sports car from Brecon, she walked in, we did the whole thing in one take, voice and orchestra together, without any rehearsal, which was perfect, and she went home.
This RH / MC version is light and luminous and intimate and honest, and if only Mahler could have heard it he would, I'm sure, have loved it.
Thank you!

[@SpudWil]

Mahler didn’t score his 9th symphony for 16 musicians, but the Klaus Simon reduced version provided me with one of my life’s most astonishingly intense musical evenings. I think the emphasis flung here on the voice is also extraordinarily effective.

[@earldennis6417]

Your work always brightens my day.

[@ManchesterCollective]

Nothing like a bit of Mahler for the day 🌄

[@chong2389]

Sorry, strings are not an acceptable substitute for brass. Had Mahler wanted it scored for strings, he would have done so.