The BBC iPlayer, which every summer makes me fall that much further behind in my CD listening, is offering a voluptuously apocalyptic Prom by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. The program consists of the Act I Prelude from Parsifal, Strauss's Four Last Songs with Karita Mattila, and a colossal entity that Rattle, in his introductory remarks, aptly named "an imaginary Eleventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, or Seventeenth": Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Webern's Six Pieces, and Berg's Three, played without pause. The audio is available until September 17th.
