Programme
Mahler : Symphony No 7 in E minor
1. Langsam-allegro
2. Nachtmusik I: Allegro moderato
3. Scherzo: Schattenhaft
4. Nachtmusik II
5. Rondo-Finale: Allegro ordinario/allegro moderato, ma energico

Performers
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)

Mahler's Symphony No 7 is often sidelined as the "least Mahlerian" of his nine (or ten or eleven, depending on how you count). Much of this is down to the last movement, an odd, almost confusing collage of styles ending in a C major theme that sounds Wagnerian. Yet it is the one symphony known to a wide audience in Britain, through the solemnly beautiful wind fragment used in the television adverts through the 1970s and 1980s for Castrol GTX.

Many believe that the Seventh's musical language is the most radical and forward-looking Mahler wrote. Schoenberg loved it: he regarded it as the work that signalled the end of Romanticism. Certainly it has a twilight feeling - hence those two night music movements, one of which provided the oil jingle - perhaps suggesting that the old certainties are being questioned.

Mahler began the score in 1904, while he was still finishing the Sixth Symphony. He composed the two Nachtmusik movements first, and had finished and revised it thoroughly two years later; it was premiered in Prague in 1908, with Mahler - a conductor by profession and only a part-time composer - taking the baton.