Name: Simón Bolívar Orchestra/Dudamel: Mahler 3
Start: 2025-01-15T19:30:00+00:00
Location: Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS London, United Kingdom

$Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar Orchestra\/Dudamel: Mahler 3$

Gustavo Dudamel returns to the hall at the head of his ‘other’ orchestra: the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. There’s just one work, but Mahler’s mighty Symphony No 3 is a stand-alone masterpiece.
Famously, Mahler told Sibelius that a symphony ‘must be like the world: it must embrace everything’. And what a world is embraced by his Symphony No 3! The longest of Mahler’s symphonies it’s also one of the most ambitious. From the fruity 8-horns opening as Pan awakes, to the radiant love-infused finale described by one critic after the premiere as ‘perhaps the greatest adagio since Beethoven’, it’s a work of bold contrasts, exquisitely imagined colours, and all-consuming passions. Little wonder that after the first performance a 15-minute ovation recalled Mahler to the podium a dozen times.
French mezzo Marianne Crebassa ‘is truly a revelation’ insists Die Weld, while for the Los Angeles Times, ‘the overpowering grandeur of Dudamel’s Mahler Third is ultimately and irresistibly Utopian’.