Chen Reiss and Lahav Shani: Strauss and Mahler VI

Lahav Shani combines Mahler's powerful Sixth Symphony with songs by his contemporary Strauss. Soloist: the soprano Chen Reiss. 'One of the most perfect Strauss voices imaginable,' said one reviewer.

The friends Mahler and Strauss
Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were peers and the most famous conductors of their generation. It may surprise many, but they were also close friends. Mahler strained to bring Strauss' operas to the stage; Strauss, in turn, conducted his colleague's early symphonies. Both spent the concert season conducting and the summer months composing. Mahler retreated to his Komponierhäuschen in the Austrian Alps; Strauss remained at home in the villa he had built with the proceeds of his opera Salome in the Bavarian Alps.

The singer-composer and the symphonist
Mahler and Strauss were both music directors of the Vienna Court Opera for several seasons. The first left there with a falling out; the other kept a beautiful villa in Vienna. Mahler married the composer Alma, 20 years younger, at 42. Strauss married the famous soprano Pauline de Ahna, daughter of a general. They were spirited marriages. But where Strauss achieved frenzied success with his operas and songs, Mahler, on the contrary, wrote nine symphonies - works of which he knew, "meine Zeit wird kommen.