Symphony, tone-poem, song, oratorio and folk music all come together in Mahler’s Third, a gigantic canvas that outdoes even the Second Symphony in dimensions and celebrates the ridiculous as well as the sublime. It certainly divided opinion: Arnold Schoenberg, who had originally resisted Mahler’s music, extolled its drama and truth; William Walton, on the other hand, declared that it wasn’t a symphony at all. The Third Symphony, completed in 1896, is a huge, six-movement behemoth, in which the first lasts nearly as long as the rest put together, and which encompasses everything from children’s songs to texts by Nietzsche and adds to the instrumental line-up a boys’ chorus and a solo mezzo-soprano. Mahler originally gave movement titles that revealed a kind of spiritual journey, with each movement aspiring higher than the previous one, ending, inevitably, with transcendent love. But perhaps Mahler wasn’t thinking only of spiritual love in his finale, being at the time in the midst of a tumultuous affair with a soprano named Anna von Mildenburg. The work was initially a huge success when Mahler premiered it in 1902, though two years later the Viennese gave it a rougher reception.

In his day, Mahler was as renowned an interpreter of the music of others as he was a composer. The Viennese composer Friedrich Cerha (born 1926) is also a great champion of others – not least via his completion of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu and through the foundation of the new-music ensemble Die Reihe to promote contemporary music in Vienna. Cerha also expresses an uncannily Mahlerian sentiment in the work we hear tonight, Like a Tragicomedy.

6.30pm Preview
Richard Wigley in conversation with H.K. Gruber.

The BBC Philharmonic and Hallé concerts will be recorded for BBC Radio 3. The concerts will be broadcast from 5 April on consecutive Mondays at 7.00pm for 10 weeks.