Song of the Night: Rattle conducts Mahler | London Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle dives headlong into the dream world of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.

Gustav Mahler once said that the symphony should be like the world – ‘it should embrace everything’. In his huge Seventh Symphony, he sweeps from an overcast Alpine lake through love songs, nightmares and moonlit marches to a roof-raising finish hung with jangling cowbells and laced with pitch-black humour. In short, Mahler doesn’t get more Mahler-ish than this.

Not that Sir Simon Rattle needs telling., He’s been conducting Mahler since he was a teenager, and this wild, fantastic fairy-tale of a symphony is particularly close to his heart. ‘There’s only one Mahler – he takes in everything’, he says, and tonight he dives headfirst into a world of soaring emotion and untrammelled sonic imagination.