CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. Recorded at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, 8 May 2011 Producer – Misha Donat Engineer – Jonathan Stokes, Classic Sound Ltd Design – With Relish (for the Philharmonia Orchestra) and Darren Rumney Cover image CLebrecht Music & Arts MAHLER LORIN MAAZEL P2013 Philharmonia Orchestra C2013 Signum Records SYMPHONY NO. 3 24 1 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. “On Mahler” Mahler’s earlier symphonies frequently draw GUSTAV MAHLER on the world of his Wunderhorn songs – A century after his death, Mahler’s music settings of simple folk poems about birds and SYMPHONY NO. 3 resonates more powerfully than ever. Its animals, saints and sinners, soldiers and their unique mix of passionate intensity and lovers. But this apparently naive, even childlike CD1 terrifying self-doubt seems to speak directly to Part One tone is found alongside vast musical our age. One moment visionary, the next canvasses that depict the end of the world. In 1 I. Kräftig. Entscheiden 37.46 despairing, this is music that sweeps us up in quieter, more intimate movements, Mahler CD2 its powerful current and draws us along in its seems to speak intimately and directly to the Part Two drama. We feel its moments of ecstatic rapture listener, but the big outer movements are 2 II. Tempo di Menuetto. Sehr mässig 11.32 and catastrophic loss as if they were our own. addressed to the entire world. At its most This is not music for detached contemplation: sentimental, Mahler’s music echoes the fairy- 3 III. Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast 17.39 it matters to us, urgently and directly. Its tales of children’s picture books, yet in the 4 IV. Sehr langsam. Misterioso 9.10 musical language may be romantic, but what next moment it marches with gritted teeth and 5 V. Lustig im Tempo und keck in Ausdruck 4.15 makes Mahler’s music so distinctively modern unleashes terrifying violence. is its unflinching honesty – its embrace of the 6 VI. Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden 25.51 contradictions of life and of art. Few All this makes for great symphonic dramas, Total timings: 68.29 composers wrote music of such searing lyrical often lasting more than an hour, which imply a PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA intensity, nor music that is often ironic to the vivid sense of storytelling without ever being point of parody. But it took a long time for this confined to a specific programme (as a young PHILHARMONIA VOICES unique tone to be understood; in his own man, Mahler adopted the idea of programmes TIFFIN BOYS’ CHOIR time, critics heard Mahler’s ability to see the from the tone poems of Richard Strauss, but SARAH CONNOLLY MEZZO-SOPRANO world from several perspectives as a sign of soon abandoned them). This is a composer LORIN MAAZEL CONDUCTOR insincerity. Today, we tend to read it as quite who insisted that the symphony should www.signumrecords.com the opposite. ‘include the whole world’ – hence its bewildering 2 3 23 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. mix of different characters, and the sense that, and annotations on his scores, he encouraged Symphony No. 3 (1895-96) unordered by the rational or moral codes of for him, it worked rather like the great novels of listening to his music as a kind of modern society, and the music to his vast first the 19th century, such as those by Dostoyevsky autobiography, as Berlioz had before him. As he had been with both his First and Second movement certainly seems to bear this out. or Balzac. symphonies, Mahler was initially ambivalent But like all great art, Mahler’s music far about whether the Third was indeed a Like the Second Symphony, the Third is a mega- We should remember that Mahler was a man exceeds the life that made it, just as it far symphony or a symphonic poem. The early symphony, a work with a cosmic ambition to of the theatre who, for the 30 years of his exceeds his own age. His symphonies look outline sketches from 1895 suggest various sum up the trajectory of creation itself, in professional life, spent most of his time and back to those of Beethoven and Schubert, but programmatic titles for individual movements Mahler’s own words ‘a musical poem embracing energy conducting in the opera house. He at the same time forwards to the music of and for the work as a whole. One such was all stages of development in a step-wise ascent knew how to create an effect, to stage a scene Shostakovich and Britten. In his later works he ‘The Happy Life, a Midsummer Night’s Dream’, [that] begins with inanimate nature and and to pace a drama. But, like anyone who has was increasingly drawn to the music of Bach, though without any intended reference to ascends to the love of God.’ This vast worked in the theatre, he had an acute sense at the same time that his own music was Shakespeare’s play. Another was ‘Symphony conception has to be understood in the context that all art is ultimately artifice and make- revered by the young Schoenberg and his No. 3: The Joyful Science. A Summer Morning’s of an age that was highly attracted to grand, all- believe. His favourite writers were those whose pupils. This is music that crosses historical Dream’. The reference here is to Nietzsche’s encompassing accounts of the natural world. works underline their own fictionality which is boundaries – as contemporary and vital now Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, usually translated Mahler had a lifelong interest in philosophical why, after the dust of the drama has settled, as it was a hundred years ago. as The Gay Science, published in 1882. If and scientific theories and read widely in these there is a quality of Mahler’s music that recalls there are any links between Mahler’s music areas, but he was also part of a cultural the enchanted forest of Shakespeare’s A and Nietzsche’s book they lie in a shared tone tradition in which artists and musicians Midsummer Night’s Dream. of irreverence rather than any philosophical expected to take on the great themes of life and content. A third possible title was simply ‘Pan: death. He had a life-long devotion to the works Perhaps it is this many-sided character to the Symphonic Poems’. The reference to the Greek of Richard Wagner, whose last music drama music that feeds our fascination with Mahler god Pan, the wild god of nature, was explicitly Parsifal (1882) was, at that time, still himself. Of course, this was fuelled by the linked in Mahler’s sketches to Dionysus, the performed only at Bayreuth under quasi- composer. Mahler subscribed fully to the god of wine but also of ecstatic ritual. In both religious conditions. Mahler’s Third Symphony Romantic idea that art is made from the life of cases, Mahler’s reference seems to be to the thus grows out of an understanding of art as a the artist and, in comments to friends, letters, Maestro Lorin Maazel timeless force of an unrestrained nature, kind of religious and philosophical quest. 4 5 4 5 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. Given such a conception, Mahler was Strauss likened the great march of the first ‘how from lifeless matter (I could just as well monosyllables it gradually learns to speak understandably frustrated that his symphony movement to the experience of a May Day have named the movement ‘What the with a lyricism and expressive tone that make became known, before its première, almost parade in the Prater Park in Vienna. The unison Mountains Tell Me’) life gradually breaks forth, great demands of the player. The entrance of entirely through performances of one isolated horn call that opens the movements was developing step-by-step into ever-higher forms summer and the displacing of winter are movement, the so-called ‘Blumenstück’ heard by some as the quotation of a 19th- of life.’ The opening call, played fortissimo on marked by a tremendous march, starting from (Flower piece). In a letter to Richard Batka, of century student protest song, as used also by eight horns in unison, seems to echo into some the distance, converging from all directions February 1896, he expressed his concern that Brahms in his Academic Festival Overture. vast emptiness. A sombre march rhythm and eventually carrying all before it. In his the public would hear him simply as a Critics railed against what they saw as the begins, the only hint of directed movement, annotations, Mahler marked one passage Der ‘sensuous, perfumed singer of nature’: symphony’s vulgar, banal and frivolous amid low rumblings in the percussion. The Gesindel (The rabble) and another passage elements, perplexed about how to understand emptiness is broken only by unpredictable Der Südsturm (The southern storm). These are ‘That this nature hides within itself everything the sudden contrasts between the rarified eruptive gestures, shooting skywards like the anarchic forces with which the world is that is frightful, great, and also lovely (which is world of symphonic music and tunes and spouts of molten lava. ‘Some passages of it renewed, the unstoppable, irrational and exactly what I wanted to express in the entire rhythms more usually heard on the street.