Season Inauguration / NOSPR / Alsop / Shaham / The Birth of a World - NOSPR

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 3 in D minor (1896) is the longest symphony he ever composed and one of the most monumental contributions to the genre as a whole. Its formal and sonic grandeur goes hand in hand with the composer’s characteristic aesthetic of contrast: pathos is juxtaposed here with irony, and intricate textures with roughly hewn march rhythms. Idyllic dance stylisations and radiant, hymn-like climaxes coexist with dark, weighty masses of sound and onomatopoeic evocations of everyday life. The Third’s six movements are divided into two vast chapters, framed by an immense opening movement and a finale in the form of a broad adagio. What emerges is a panorama of nature and human experience, a cosmogonic tale in which the world rises from ‘unfathomable silence and sings, and resounds’. Mahler populates this universe with every form of existence and arranges them in a hierarchical order. At the summit we find love. The sprawling final adagio is devoted entirely to this highest form of existence and represents the first symphonic conclusion of this kind in Mahler’s oeuvre. In the Third, love is presented as a force that sets the world in motion – not something temporal, but something eternal and transcendent,  ‘the highest truth, the source of all being’.

Piotr Matwiejczuk (Polskie Radio)

Concert duration: approximately 100 minutes

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