Mahler: Symphony No.3
$40.00
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GUSTAV MAHLER
Mahler: Symphony No.3
Sara Mingardo (contralto) / Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, François-Xavier Roth
[ Harmonia Mundi / 2 CD ]
Release Date: Friday 8 February 2019
This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.
A masterpiece first played by the Gürzenich Orchestra. The premiere of Mahler's Third Symphony took place in June 1902 in Krefeld (not far from Düsseldorf), but it was indeed the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne which gave that first performance... greeted with acclaim - this was not always the composer's experience with his masterpieces. Originally conceived as a hymn to Nature, in which the inert chaos of the opening movement is gradually left behind, the work calls for enormous forces (large orchestra, women's choir, boys' choir, and contralto soloist) and at each hearing leaves an unforgettable impression on the audience. Such was the case in October 2018, when François-Xavier Roth led the esteemed successors of the work's first interpreters in this latest Mahler adventure.
"Roth and the Cologne orchestra have a knack of making the most familiar Mahler sound new, with vivid extremes of colour and dynamics. Hearing the prodigious Third makes me marvel afresh at it, and at the stupidity of critics who were deaf to its greatness" Sunday Times
"With a first movement majoring on local colour and fresh-faced charm, Francois-Xavier Roth leaves Mahler's potentially laboured metaphysics to take care of themselves in later movements… There is a Wunderhorn-style warmth and energy to her singing that leads us naturally into the fifth movement's angelic tableau (beautifully sonorous bells, boys and girls too)." Gramophone
"Timbres matter a lot to Roth...and the detailed interplay of colours and solo lines stand out spectacularly...He and his talented Cologne musicians neither wallow nor preen, they simply let the music speak, expertly navigating the extended first movement's shifting moods and letting the final slow movement's measured crescendo reach its peak without any prodding." The Times
"[Roth] goes at the crazy world of the Third with all wind and brass guns blazing…He isn't afraid to get his hands dirty with the raggle-taggle marchers of the first movement. Even the trombone sounds more like a raw force of nature than a sophisticated funeral master…Roth shows he can do serious too, with mezzo Sara Mingardo symbolic of the performance as a whole: not an unearthly oracle but a feeling human being." ***** BBC Music
