Mahler’s Third Symphony

Mahler’s longest, wildest symphony begins with what feels like the birth of creation.  Nature is roused to life, from the boom of primordial brass to the murmuring heartbeats from the strings and woodwinds.  This is a thunderous nature, not only a pretty pastoral awakening, but a volcanic eruption of fire and rocks and, somewhere there, humankind.  This first movement is famously fractured, with a strange stop-start punctuation, not to all tastes.

Mahler throws everything at it, as do the 90 musicians of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with a soloist and two mass choirs standing by. His inspirations are Austrian folk songs and dances, fairgrounds and landscapes, competing musical threads and heroic struggles, with endless military marches and splendid processions.  

Leading it all is the SSO’s Chief Conductor Simone Young, who so skilfully balances Mahler’s 100 minutes of high tragedy and light amusements, through all his primal roaring, playfulness and quiet introspection.  Young is applauded globally for her Mahler expertise, and it shines in her commanding ability to follow the composer’s likely manic-depressive personality and articulate each of his many musical moods.

Beautiful moments occur when the orchestra’s monumental progress is suddenly stilled by a single flugelhorn, once from just offstage, another within the orchestra so tenderly rising to be heard. Then the dynamic pace resumes, Mahler’s score always running, somewhere.  The action cools again with the arrival of the statuesque contralto Noa Beinart who gives voice, so voluptuous yet unadorned, to the words of Nietzsche, as Mahler dives deep into the darkness of the human soul.   

Acceptance and repentance arrive in the penultimate fifth movement, with the song of the morning bells, from the Sydney Children’s Choir and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.  That’s 200 choristers – pity Mahler kept their contribution so short.

With the resolution of human doubt, Mahler then moves us slowly and teasingly towards the light and the glory and a wonderous finale to this mad universe.

After such a concert it’s hard to believe that Mahler’s music was ignored for decades after his death, and still this Third Symphony in D Major is problematic.   

At the reception, Young said, over dinner recently in Berlin with the veteran conductor Daniel Barenboim, she asked if he had any advice for one about to conduct Mahler’s Third.

“It’s my least favourite of his symphonies,” was all he said. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Jay Patel