Mahler: Symphony No.8 in E flat major, 'Symphony of a Thousand'

Mardi Byers – soprano
Twyla Robinson – soprano
Malin Christensson – soprano
Stephanie Blythe – mezzo-soprano
Kelley O'Connor – mezzo-soprano
Nikolai Schukoff – tenor
Hanno Müller-Brachmann – baritone
Tomasz Konieczny – bass
Choristers of St Paul's Cathedral
Choristers of Westminster Abbey
Choristers of Westminster Cathedral
BBC Symphony Chorus
Crouch End Festival Chorus
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiří Bělohlávek conductor


Conductor Jiří Bělohlávek


Sacred monster. This year’s Proms season began with the Mahler Eighth, which is like having the Queen Mary

 tootle up the Thames for the first day of Henley. (To let us down gently, we get Die Meistersinger
 tomorrow night and Simon Boccanegra
 the night after that – no musician in London will go without a paycheck this week.) In the bad old days all of Mahler’s symphonies were accused of being freakishly outsized, but only this one, to my mind, qualifies. One longs for it to be smaller, even when the chorus is only six hundred strong, as it was last night, well short of the eight hundred or so it would take to qualify as the “Symphony of a Thousand” – to be fair, the nickname was added by an imaginative impressario. The symphony has trouble getting ashore, but worse than that, Mahler’s conception is self-defeating.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller