Mahler: Symphony No. 3

Did you miss this concert? Were you there and would like to hear it again—because once is not enough? You're in luck—
NEC has made it available at InstantEncore.

To play or download the performances, go to instantencore.com/necmusic—there are no fees involved. You will need to have or create an account to complete the process. Your account will also allow you to receive notifications of future concerts.

He's more than a bunch of symphonies and songs. Even those are not what you think. And although the music stopped with his death in 1911—100 years later, his time is now. During four months of concerts, jam sessions, conversation, and film, free your mind about what Mahler really means.

Hugh Wolff, NEC's Stanford and Norma Jean Calderwood Director of Orchestras, leads the NEC Philharmonia, NEC Women's Choir, and Preparatory School Children's Chorus in Mahler's Symphony No. 3. Vocal soloist is mezzo-soprano Jaime Korkos, a student of Luretta Bybee.

Mahler famously asserted to his frequent correspondent Natalie Bauer-Lechner that “creating a symphony means to construct a world, with all technical means at one’s disposal.” His Third Symphony (composed 1895-6, revised 1899, premiered in Krefeld, Germany 1902) was a case in point, having, at least during its initial gestation, a cosmological arrangement of movements describing an evolutionary process of the World’s creation. Mahler wrote in a letter: “My work is a musical poem that goes through all the stages of evolution, step by step. It begins with inanimate Nature and progresses to God’s love.”

The programmatic titles of the movements, along the lines of “Pan Awakens”, “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me” and “What Mankind Tells Me,” were perhaps useful stimuli for Mahler’s musical imagination. But when the enormous two-part, six-movement work—Mahler's longest—was completed, the titles were replaced by more conventional formal/tempo designations, albeit complex and extended.

Even without a program, however, the work demonstrates what one scholar has termed “linguistic variety” that encompasses a whole world. “…We find not only the highly developed language of classical music, but also the dialects of folk music and, indeed, even the low or simply unschooled language of popular or light music,” writes Constantin Floros in his examination of the symphonies. “Here one finds the jargon of military music, and the more elevated language of funeral marches…classical music of the concert hall…the music of the ‘lower class’ and the music of times past, the language of church music…the musical language of children…” What’s more, Mahler once again breaks out of the symphony’s instrumental confines and writes for choruses and alto soloist in the fourth and fifth movements where he sets Nietzsche’s Midnight Song and Es sungen drei Engel einen süßen Gesang (Three Angels Sang a Sweet Song) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

As Mahler put it, “my symphony will be unlike anything the world has ever heard! All of nature speaks in it, telling deep secrets that one might guess only in a dream.”

Read Katarina Markovic's note on Symphony No. 3 and find other Mahler program notes.