Paris, France - Orchestre de Paris - Mahler

Performing with
Christa Mayer, alto
Orchestre de Paris
Women’s choir and children’s choir of the Orchestre de Paris
Semyon Bychkov, conductor

Programme
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 3

Meditative, cosmic, dark, lyrical, mysteriously speculative, the longest of Mahler’s symphonies constitutes a unique musical experience, at the end of the orchestral expressiveness and spells of the voice.

Composed between 1895 and 1896, this work of extraordinary dimensions is conceived as a pantheistic ode to nature. His six movements, two of which involve the voice, are all contrasting meditations on the place of man in the cosmos. Mahler’s own dramatic accents and anxiety have their place, of course, but as if transcended by a philosophical meditation.

The world is mineral and telluric in the immense first movement, more rural and pastoral in the second, dedicated to vegetation, gracefully animal in the third, rustling with birdsong. Then comes the famous fourth movement, dedicated to the appearance of man with the use of an excerpt from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (“O man, beware!”). Dreamlike, dark, this immaterial moment pauses to make way for the fifth movement, whose two choirs shape a climate of legendary naivety, before the work ends with a large Adagio, eminently Mahlerian, dedicated to the cruel lessons of life and love. (Text: Orchestre de Paris)