Danish National Symphony Orchestra The Danish National Symphony Orchestra was founded as a radio orchestra in 1925 in connection with the launch of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), and consists today of 99 musicians. The orchestra is based in the DR Concert Hall, one of Europe's most spectacular concert halls, which was inaugurated in 2009. The Concert Hall was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and its acoustics were designed by Yasuhisa Toyota. The orchestra's strong, straightforward musical personality has its roots in its close links with Danish and other Nordic music. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra is the leading Carl Nielsen orchestra in the world. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra gives 70 concerts per year. The weekly Thursday Concerts are a unique concert series that has taken place since 1932. Every week these concerts are broadcast live by Danish Radio and many of these on TV as well.

Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony is often viewed as a valedictory work, a final statement from the last symphonic master in the Austro-German musical tradition. Naturally, there is plenty of evidence to both confirm and complicate such a view, and a brief survey of that evidence allows the compelling story of Mahler's Ninth to begin to take shape. Mahler was thinking about death when he composed the Ninth. His four-year-old daughter had died in 1907, traumatizing the composer - he could not bear mention of the child's name - and forcing the family to move to find a new summer retreat, one free of painful associations. In 1907, Mahler was also diagnosed with the heart condition that would kill him four years later. So in the Ninth Symphony we definitely have a composer preoccupied with "the end," with his own and others' mortality. But Mahler didn't see the Ninth as his final work - the Tenth, much of which he completed before he died, ended up being that. He was simply grappling with the same questions of life and death he faced in much of his music. Many of Mahler's young admirers - among them Berg and Arnold Schoenberg - had already started to experiment with atonality by 1909, but Mahler's achievement in the Ninth Symphony, with its combination of deeply personal expression, massive but coherent musical structures, and unraveling tonality, had enormous implications for these young composers. The Symphony, then, may have been a kind of farewell for the composer, but it also pointed the way toward