Mahler lovers are spoiled for choice this year. Less than a week after Mahler’s Seventh in Brisbane, Sydney Symphony Orchestra opens its 2024 season with the composer’s Fifth. Composed over the summers of 1901 and 1902, it moves from a funerary opening movement to a triumphant declaration of Mahler’s love for his wife Alma, whom he had met just before commencing work on the symphony. In 1968, Leonard Bernstein famously conducted the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the Adagietto at the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy. SSO’s Chief Conductor has paired the symphony with Camille Pépin’s Violin Concerto, which will be performed by Renaud Capuçon.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is an extraordinary creation in both sound and scale. This vast musical journey builds from a luminous fanfare from a single trumpet to moments of great explosive power and a poignant contemplation of love in the Adagietto – one of the best-loved movements in all of music. Under the dynamic direction of Simone Young, Mahler’s vast architecture is revealed, and his stunning colours burn bright.

A rising star, French composer Camille Pépin has created an enchanting expression of life’s technicolour with her Violin Concerto. A work of long, shimmering chords, suspended and weightless, has a peerless interpreter in Renaud Capuçon, who, together with Simone Young, gave the world premiere of the work with the Orchestre National de France in April 2022. Co-commissioned by the Sydney Symphony, it’s our turn to hear this duo deliver Pépin’s compelling new work.