Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D minor

Klaus Tennstedt (1926–1998) was one of the great Mahlerians of his time and, over a period of 10 years, he recorded a Mahler cycle in the studio with the LPO where he was music director from 1983 to his retirement due to ill health in 1987.

This recording has never been issued before and is sourced from the BBC’s master tapes.

This 1986 performance from London’s Royal Festival Hall differs from the studio recording made in the late 1970s. As Michael McManus states in his booklet notes, ‘Fine though the studio recording from 1979 was and is, this live performance has an intensity and integrity that few, if any, recordings of this work can match’ and ‘Tennstedt in concert was a very different creature from Tennstedt in the studio. Mahler in particular was a lifeand-death experience in the concert hall’.

The sound captured by the BBC engineers is state of the art and easily captures Mahler’s huge dynamic range.

As a bonus, there is a short interview from 1987 in which Tennstedt discusses Mahler interpretation with Michael Oliver.

Jonathan Nott has been the principal conductor of the Bamberger Symphoniker since the year 2000 and this has been a very successful partnership. Their recording of Mahler’s 9th Symphony (TUDOR7162) won several awards “This is a fine achievement in a towering symphony.” BBC Music Magazine

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960), a most distinguished Mahlerian, was one of the great conductors of his generation, the music director of the New York Philharmonic and a frequent guest conductor of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics as well as La Scala, Milan.

This Cologne performance of Mahler’s Symphony No.3 from 31 October 1960 is the only complete performance of the work conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, the only other being his 1956 broadcast with the New York Philharmonic which is distorted by cuts and amendments.

It is the only officially released recording of Mitropoulos’s performance and together with Debussy’s La Mer, is sourced from WDR’s own master tapes.

The Cologne concert took place two days before Mitropoulos’s death in Milan on 2 November 1960. The set is completed by Mitropoulos’s outstanding interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer. A worthy document of a great condutor.

SAMPLE TRACK Mahler: Symphony No.3 - 1st Movement

Recording locations: Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin, Germany, January 1996 (Schoenberg); Konzerthaus Schauspielhaus, Berlin, Germany, June/August 1995 (Mahler)

Two gargantuan late-Romantic Austrian works are coupled on this very rare recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin. The recording had limited release in Germany and this is its first international release.

Mahler’s Third Symphony is the longest symphony by any composer to be part of the basic repertoire and, at first, had subtitles attached to each of the movements. But the composer had a distrust for programmatic music and by the time the symphony was published and premiered, these verbal explications had been removed.

Mahler and Schoenberg met in 1904 at a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht. The older composer became a defender of Schoenberg’s work, conducting it when he could. Schoenberg, whose outlook on Mahler’s work was at first unfavourable, was bowled over by the Third Symphony and regarded it as a work of genius. His own Pelleas und Melisande based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play, is a gargantuan symphonic poem and was his first completed orchestral work. The orchestral forces (as with the Mahler Symphony) are huge, and although Schoenberg includes no vocal parts, the orchestra is handled with considerable bravura and includes 64 strings (plus two harps), 17 woodwinds, 18 brass and 8 percussion.

"an inexorable force that seemed to come from nowhere but infact had been cleverly prepared for. This is the kind of work that reveals the LSO itself as a real community of an orchestra, a collection of talented individuals responding to Mahler's every solo opportunity but dedicated to a common cause" Daily Telegraph concert review

"the LSO was all power and perspiration, muscle and machismo. Even in the radiant, hymn-like final movement Gergiev found (and seized upon) hidden storms and stresses" The Times concert review

Both, Mahler's First and Third symphonies, originally enjoyed subtitles for their movements. The first movement of the First was one 'Spring Without End', the second 'Under Full Sail'. For the Third, Mahler paid tribute to the Flowers in the Meadow, the Animals in the Froest, Man, Angels and Love, respectively, for its five movements. Both the Mehta recordings have a real sense of presence and space about them, and the elegiac finale of the Third was recorded in a single take.

The next disc in the hugely acclaimed series. Symphony No.2 (OC647) was a Classic FM Editor’s Choice: “All the enormity and intimacy of Mahler’s Second Symphony is here to be savoured.”