Luogo e data di registrazione		All Saints' Church, Tooting, London (Gran Bretagna) - gennaio/febbraio 1994
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Recording Engineer		Hans-Rudolf Müller
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 447 051-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 61' 23" & 38' 00" | (p) 1995 | 4D DDD
	Note		-

Mahler’s Third begins in unambiguously rousing fashion: the first theme, marked "forceful, peremptory", is played by eight horns in unison, and in his sketches Mahler termed it "Der Weckruf", or "Reveille". The bold brash sound makes it clear that large instrumental forces will be involved, but the theme can also be heard as a signal of another kind: its close resemblance to one of the student songs used by Brahms in his Academic Festival Overture proclaims that Mahler’s symphonic “festival” will be defiantly unacademic; that models of Brahmsian formal rectitude will be swept away in a torrent of Nietzschean abandon. This arresting opening is not where Mahler began his composition of the symphony: in fact, the huge first movement (or Part I, with the remaining five movements forming Part II) was Written last, even though one of its main ideas was sketched out at an early stage of the worlds genesis. Yet the fact that music which, for the listener, prepares the ground for the work as a whole was, for the composer, as much a response to what follows as a preparation for it, goes to the heart of the symphony’s remarkable range of expression as well as its pervasive ambiguity, its tendency to question the very things it asserts with such confidence. Mahler claimed for the symphony as a whole “the same scaffolding, the same basic ground-plan, that you’ll find in the works of Mozart and, on a grander scale, of Beethoven”; at the same time, however, his sequence of movements is not that of Mozart or Beethoven, and he was clear that “the variety and complexity within the movements is greater”. Mahler was right to conclude that the symphonic principle could survive changes in the classical order and number of movements, especially if, as some commentators would claim, the greater length and more intense expressiveness of themes that are often more songlike or folklike than those used by the Classical masters are not necessarily to be equated with greater complexity. Complexity and ambiguity tend to arise in Mahler from the competing claims of the “purely musical” and the “primarily programmatic”, and the Third Symphony is a fine demonstration of how that competition can achieve a compelling and ultimately coherent - if not conventionally integrated - form. When Mahler completed it, in 1896, he was 36 and well launched on a career that divided his energies between conducting (with much administrative responsibility) and composing. His reading of Nietzsche encouraged an uncompromising response to political and cultural issues of the day, while demanding a metaphysical context in which the epic struggle between Apollo and Dionysus was eternally played out. Mahler did not expect the work to win easy success, not least because it moved so decisively beyond his two earlier symphonies: “It soars above that world of struggle and sorrow and could only have been produced as a result of them.” Conceived as a celebration of the “happy life” attained in the Second Symphony’s triumphant conclusion, it was originally planned as a sequence of seven responses to aspects of nature and humanity progressing to an image of childlike innocence. That ending would be employed a few years later in the Fourth Symphony. In ending the Third with a finale of serene expansiveness, and a vision of love that goes well beyond the childlike, Mahler created the need for a substantial, much more earthy initial complement to the finale’s sublimity. The sense, in the final design, of progression from rampant natural forces (Part I) through more civilizing natural and social circumstances to transcendent spiritual fulfilment remains true to the generative idea of the “happy life”, yet also preserves the tension between a radical desire for greater social progress and purely spiritual aspirations. Part I comprises an Introduction - "Pan awakes" - and the first movement proper - "Summer marches in (Bacchic procession)". Mahler wrote of a process in which a “captive life struggling for release from the clutches of lifeless, rigid Nature... finally breaks through and triumphs”, and the essentially earthly concerns of this music are clear from his confession that “the entire thing is unfortunately... tainted with my disreputable sense of humour”. He also said that the opening “will be just like the military band on parade. Such a mob is milling around, you never saw anything like it”. As “satyrs and other such rough children of nature disport themselves”, winter is driven out “and summer, in his strength and superior power, soon gains undisputed mastery”. The first movement can be seen as a gigantic commentary on traditional sonata-form design and, although such a radical reinterpretation of a hallowed model continues to provoke widely contrasted responses, the structure and the material of Part I are entirely appropriate to the work’s large purpose: humanity can and must explore nature as both benign and threatening, and human nature can believe itself capable of the highest fulfilment, even when aware of the midnight bell’s message that neither summer nor life itself last for ever. In Part Il of the symphony, perspective and scale shift substantially, without destroying either ambiguity or coherence. “What the flowers in the meadow tell me” may be a graceful Minuet, but, as Mahler noted, “the mood doesn't remain one of innocent, flower-like serenity”. Even in summer there are storms and, at the end, a mood tinged with regret for what must pass. To shift from Minuet to Scherzando (“What the animals in the forest tell me”) is to intensify the contrasts. This movement, Mahler wrote, “is at once the most scurrilous and most tragic there ever Was” and “there is such a gruesome, Panic humour in it that one is more likely to be overcome by horror than laughter”. References to Mahler’s setting of a Wunderhorn poem about the cuckoo’s death are lighthearted enough, but the emergence of a distant posthorn call is an intrusion, initially serene, that turns the mood towards an increasingly unstable aggressiveness. Clearly, it is time for a direct human response to nature’s apprehensive exuberance. Movement No. 4, “What Man tells me”, gives verbal form to the work’s most fundamental ambiguity. Nietzsche’s verse juxtaposes sorrow and joy, while the music’s oscillation between minor and major, and its restrained, rapt atmosphere, embody the perception that joy is as inseparable from sorrow as life is from death. No. 5, “What the angels tell me”, declares that the love of God will bring heavenly joy, and the music refers to the song “Das himmlische Leben”, later used to end the Fourth Symphony. As a simple solution to the problems of humanity this may be deemed dreamlike, or simply a fantasy - a subversive equation between religious faith and childishness which is at the furthest remove from the Bacchic yea-saying of Part I. To redress the balance, No, 6, "What love tells me", portrays deep human feeling as the ultimate reality, transcending the apparently simplc sentiment of the movements main melody by generating an apotheosis of epic grandeur. The Adagio’s variation-like structure and superbly controlled culminative effect underline the sense of a progression within a sustained state of mind, as if to argue that love consoles us by encouraging us to live intensely in the present, occasional doubts and crises serving only to reinforce and ultimately ennoble that consolation. Alternatively, the music’s chorale-like recurrences can be heard as a prayerful ascent to a vision of the Divine, in which humanity at last conquers nature and attains immortality. Either reading is possible: yet the sheer assertive power of the ending, as if Mahler wants to evoke the ambiguity attending the gods’ entry into Valhalla at the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, seems to say that the spirit which triumphs here is, above all, mortal. Mahler’s message is that all songs in human music are of the earth, and all human symphonies, even the grandest, are artefacts, whose possible wider significances remain matters of endless, fascinating, but necessarily inconclusive debate. Arnold Whittall