The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoyed a long and intensive artistic collaboration, which was brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK is now presenting outstanding live recordings of concerts from the past years that have not yet been released. This recording of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony documents concerts from November 2005 from the Munich Philharmonie im Gasteig. Since Haitink conducted a Munich subscription concert for the first time in 1958, he has repeatedly stood at the podium of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra - in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz or in the Philharmonie im Gasteig. Their congenial collaboration lasted more than six decades. Orchestral musicians and singers enjoyed working with him just as much as the BR sound engineers. Haitink was highly regarded worldwide as an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, especially the German-Austrian late Romantic period. Gustav Mahler's symphonies were also always in the best of hands with him. For him, the audibility of the sound architecture of a musical composition with its multi-layered interweaving was the highest principle: extreme sensitivity of sound paired with a clearly structured interpretation of the notes. In his fourth symphony, Gustav Mahler brought his preoccupation with the poems from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" to a provisional climax. Texts from this collection of poems, published between 1805 and 1808 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, had already been incorporated into the "Wunderhorn Symphonies" Nos. 2 and 3. In his fourth symphony, composed between 1899 and 1901, the Wunderhorn poem "Das himmlische Leben", which Mahler had already set to music in 1892, is now heard in the final movement. From a child's perspective, it paints a picture of an otherworldly land of milk and honey. Mahler's skeptical view of the world of his time creates a utopian alternative with this "heavenly world".