Thus Spoke the Juilliard Orchestra & Gustav Mahler at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 09 March 2026 15:22

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Rachel Papo, courtesy of Juilliard

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, on the night of Monday, April 14th, 2025 I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb performance of Gustav Mahler’s titanic Symphony No. 3 in D Minor from 1896, played by the impressive Juilliard Orchestra—admirably conducted by the accomplished David Robertson—assisted by the excellent Juilliard Community Chorus and the Juilliard Preparatory Division Chorus, under the direction of Adrian O. Rodríguez.

In instructive notes on the program by Thomas May—credited as “the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival,” a writer “about the arts for a wide variety of publications,” and the author of books including Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader—he provides some useful background on the piece:

The longest of Gustav Mahler's symphonies, the Third takes an all-encompassing perspective that, in the composer's words, “goes to the very heart of existence, where one must feel every tremor of the world and of God.” It culminates in a suprahuman vision of love as the driving force of “a Universe where everything lives and must and will live.”

Composition stretched over two summers (1895–1896), but the complete work was not premiered until June 1902, under the composer's baton, at a festival in Krefeld, Germany. In the interim, Mahler vacillated over titles proposed for each of the six movements, eventually settling on an outline comprising two parts: Part I, “Pan Awakes/Summer Marches In (Procession of Bacchus),” the monumental first movement (over one-third of the entire symphony's duration); and Part II, consisting of five movements: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,” “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me,” “What Humanity Tells Me,” “What the Angels Tell Me,” and “What Love Tells Me.” Several movements were initially presented independently or in smaller groupings, but for the 1902 premiere, Mahler rejected programmatic titles altogether.

The initial movement starts with a stirring, forceful, recurring fanfare—Mahler referred to this as “the wakeup call”—that is followed by a slow, somewhat lugubrious section that has an inchoate quality; music of a contrastingly more sprightly, sometimes pastoral, character soon emerges alongside a protracted funeral march—the jostling of these two primary strands constitutes the main body of the movement. Some passages are indeed celestial and it reaches a spirited finish. The annotator astutely comments that “Mahler anticipates the ambivalent creative force of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, in which the promise of renewed fertility is inseparable from barbaric, destructive impulses,” adding that “Remarkably, Mahler composed this music after he had written Part II.”

The next movement—a graceful and enchanting minuet—is a vehicle for a more familiar Romanticism; it ends abruptly but happily and peacefully. About the third movement, May records that “Mahler based its first part on an orchestral transcription of an earlier song setting of a text from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn” that inspired the composer’s first four symphonies. The movement begins cheerfully, even joyfully, and then intensifies; with the sounding of an offstage horn, a moment of serenity is briefly achieved but more dynamic music displaces this at the close.

The haunting fourth movement is an orchestral lyric that was beautifully sung by the wonderful mezzo-soprano, Samantha Hankey, a Juilliard graduate. The annotator explains:

Here, Mahler sets an excerpt from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra— the “Midnight Song” or “Drunken Song”—representing the moment when Zarathustra has his epiphany of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche's idea—that one must affirm all of existence, knowing it will recur infinitely— acknowledges the suffering coursing through the first movement, without the illusion of an afterlife to explain it.

The ringing of bells inaugurates the enchanting, largely celebratory, choral, fifth movement; about it, May remarks that “Another Wunderhorn text introduces another vision of paradise: a welcoming place open even to sinners, so long as they love God.” In the last movement, the music once again ascends to an æthereal, more purely spiritual register, although there are urgent and even disquieting moments; the annotator adverts to the brass chorale that “echoes the fanfare that opened the symphony, ushering in a proclamation of heavenly assurance that brings the Third to its blissful conclusion.”

The artists, justly, were enthusiastically applauded.

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