Mahler’s powerful orchestral forces are best experienced live and where better than the gala opening of Simone Young leading the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducting Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth, a vast and moving Symphony to open the 2026 season.
The Opera House acoustics were overwhelmed twice, by the jubilant audience witnessing the welcoming and closing magic and powerful dexterity of the conductor with the full symphony orchestra. Tonight’s performance was the apex of experiences fusing the landscape of both human conditions with thei vast emotional range that fuel drama, sombreness and tranquillity.
Simone Young is a dancer at heart, weaving, bopping and shaking with her ebullient and hypnotic style coupled with the most fluid and graceful hand gestures that glide like a Balinese dancer. She has a cheeky countenance with pure gusto.
The program started with an inspiring Rhythmic Acknowledgement of Country by Adam Manning whose distinctive tribute unfolded immediately after orchestral tuning, crafting a joyous expression to honour the traditional custodians of the land. His composition transformed the Act of Acknowledgement into a living, musical gesture that was most stirring.The audience, revved-up, were treated to Qigang Chen, an Australian premier by composer Er Huange accompanied by the mesmerising keyboard dexterity of Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The composition is a variation set based on a melodic fragment that is usually an instrument interlude in Beijing Opera. The work gains much of its impact from a ‘great sense of nostalgia’ where the sounds of Chinese music are filtered through distinctive western ones. The opening fields the piano alone, calm and meditative, which gradually grows into chords from the strings before the brass, then woodwinds chords introduce faster-moving melody using flute, vibraphone, harp and percussion.
The audience were hungry for the main serving– Mahler. His work is characterised by a vastness of scale through great delicacy of orchestration often coupled with dramatic changes of emotional register, fusing popular song and dance, heroic struggles, tragedy, and sublimity.
Das Lied Von der Erde ( The Song of the Earth) was written by poet Hans Bethge then altered and interpolated by Mahler, into seven poems he chose to set. Basically the piece expresses an intense love of the physical world through images of wine, love, the moon and everyday life that harbours an an acute awareness of our limited time in the world. Its filled with sadness and longing, beautifully scored, providing the soloists, mezzo-soprano Alexandra Ionis and tenor Simon O’Neil, with wonderful opportunities.
Mahler’s Symphony ends with an extraordinary fade-out, with vocalist Alexandra Ionis singing ‘everywhere, forever…forever and ever’, while capturing beautifully the way music lives around us and in our memory. As a veteran of concerts at the Sydney Opera house, I have never experienced the great rapture and volume of clapping and whooping given to the musicians, artists and the mercurial Simone Young.
Das Lied Von der Erde written in 1908-09 by Gustav Mahler is a symphonic orchestral work for two voices and orchestra, addressing themes of living, parting and salvation. Leonard Bernstein described it as Mahler’s ‘greatest symphony’. The six movements encompass many emotional journeys, the longing of drinking and the deep sadness, making the tenor struggle at the top of his range against the power of the full orchestra, thus giving his voice its shrill, piercing quality. There is a lamentation of flowers dying and the parting of beauty, longing for love and a solo violin and flute representation of the birds the singer is describing.
All in all, an overwhelming experience.
Photography by Jay Patel
