Though these days Mahler is generally regarded as an Austrian composer, and spent the last decade of his life living and working in Vienna, he was born in Kaliště, in eastern Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austrian empire and is now in the Czech Republic. On disc at least the Czech Philharmonic, the country’s leading orchestra and in the right repertoire one of Europe’s finest, never seems to have taken Mahler’s music to its heart. But chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is currently recording a cycle of the Mahler symphonies with the orchestra for Pentatone, and the release of the Third Symphony marks the halfway point of their project.
In his sleeve note, Bychkov reveals that it was hearing a rehearsal of part of the Third Symphony when he was a boy chorister in Leningrad that fired his enthusiasm for Mahler. It’s strange then that he is also quoted as maintaining that the Third contains some of the composer’s “least hysterical” music, an odd compliment (if that is what it is) for a work which perhaps more than any other by Mahler conforms to its composer’s maxim that “a symphony should contain the world”.
