Mahler’s Symphony No 1| London Philharmonic Orchestra

Imagine you could hear silence. How would it sound? Possibly something like the massive stillness that opens Mahler’s First Symphony: the starting point for a journey to the depths of tragedy and the heights of triumph. It’s a piece that you simply have to hear live – just like Nielsen’s sunburst of an overture, and the concerto that Brett Dean wrote in 2005 for his own instrument. ‘We violists have a particular voice that is uniquely ours’, says Dean, and he imagines what might have happened ‘if Paul Hindemith had played in a band with the American singer Tom Waits’. Lawrence Power takes the composer’s place in a true 21st century classic.