The Meistersaal Sessions are a 6-part series of chamber music theme concerts with the Freigeist Ensemble at the legendary Meistersaal Berlin, conducted by Joolz Gale. The series starts with arrangements of Schoenberg, Strauss and Mahler.

Each of the four sessions in this album features one musical work that represents the roots of Freigeist Ensemble’s oeuvre. Linking the musical worlds of Berlin and Vienna, these early compositions by Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg are all featured in a chamber music format.

Totenfeier (‘celebration of death’) is one of Gustav Mahler’s early symphonic works – composed in 1888 – that was originally conceived as a symphonic poem in its own right but which soon became the precursor to the first movement of his Second Symphony, ‘Resurrection’.

Written in 1894, Richard Strauss composed “Ruhe, meine Seele” (“Rest, my soul”) for voice and piano (the first of Vier Lieder, op.27) as a wedding present for his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. As soloist Marlis Petersen explains, this song is one of Strauss’s “great dramatic pearls of the Lied repertoire”.

Chamber Symphony no.1 (Kammersymphonie Nr. 1) by Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 2024 is the 150th anniversary of his death) is one of the big game changers in classical music. Composed in 1906, the work tries to find the essence of the chamber orchestra, showcasing the very best of each musician in the most virtuosic ways.  It is with this sound-world of approx. 15 soloists that Freigeist Ensemble was founded and took Schoenberg’s idea into the 21st century with further symphonic arrangement projects.

In Eberhard Kloke’s new arrangement for ensemble, the Mädchenblumen-Lieder (“flower songs of a maiden”) are from Strauss’s younger days as a composer (written in the same year as the Totenfeier by the similarly-aged Mahler) and, until now, have only been heard in their original version for piano. “

Winner of the OPUS Klassik 2021, Freigeist Ensemble is a courageous collective of supersonic soloists from German symphony orchestras that repackages symphonic music for new audiences. Its mission is to revolutionize the style, sound and setting of classical concerts.

Recent winner of the OPUS Klassik, Joolz Gale is a versatile British conductor who not only offers a historically-informed approach to baroque, classical and early romantic repertoire but also an extensive knowledge of early 20th-century choral and symphonic repertoire.