Awakening of Nature

Mahler's Third Symphony,
appreciated by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

As outlined in Music & Vision on 15 May 2010, the National Academy of Santa Cecilia has programmed the full cycle of Mahler Symphonies during the 2010-11 season with a view to celebrating the composer in the 150th year of his birth and the hundredth year of his death. Like all symphony orchestras in Italy, the Academy follows the 'season system'; Mahler's monumental Third Symphony in D minor was scheduled to be the final concert of the 2009-10 season under the baton of the young and emerging Finnish conductor Mikko Franck (thirty one years old). At the last moment, Franck was ill, but the Academy was fortunate enough to replace him with another comparatively young conductor, thirty-nine-year-old Austrian Christian Arming. This data is meaningful because Mahler's Third is normally entrusted to older conductors due the complexity both of the score and of its underlying philosophy.

One of the striking features of the emergence of Mahler's music from fifty years of comparative obscurity is that the very symphony which used to be least played and least known -- the third -- is now one of the most frequently performed, in spite of its gigantic scale, its eccentricities and its mixture of very profound and nearly popular music...

GUSTAV MAHLER

ROME

ITALY

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

AUSTRIA