Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Last year, to mark the centenary of Mahler's birth, the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic shared a complete cycle of the composer's symphonies. This year, for the centenary of his death, Lorin Maazel and the Philharmonia have undertaken to perform them on their own. Yet you sense that for the 81-year-old conductor, a Mahler marathon is just a means of filling in the idle hours between taking up his new post as music director of the Munich Philharmonic and running his own festival in Virginia.
By his own admission, Maazel came late to Mahler, having been seduced "movement by movement, note by note". His approach is quixotic – he describes the symphonies as "like spaceships, forever orbiting and sending out signals", which may sound spaced-out, but his Mahler is a cosmic experience.
Maazel first sent out an exploratory satellite in the form of the early song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), which mezzo Michelle DeYoung swaggered through confidently, one hand planted on her hip in the manner of a principal boy.
Themes from the song cycle were later tossed into the mixed bag of styles that made up Mahler's First Symphony. Maazel's evocation of the pre-dawn haze was superlatively atmospheric – you could swear you heard cicadas in the strings. In a final moment of theatre, the horns rose to their feet for the concluding fanfare. The audience almost immediately joined them.