In a fairy tale end to the 2019 season, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra capped off the year with the second concert in Simone Young’s Visions of Vienna series, a performance of Gustav Mahler’s early cantata Das Klagende Lied. The three-year Visions of Vienna series, which began with August’s Schubert, Liszt and Ledger, has so far proven a fascinating exploration of some of the rarer gems to emerge from that storied musical hub, where Young was just recently honoured with the coveted European Culture Prize, receiving the award between conducting performances of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Vienna State Opera.

Michaela Schuster, Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Jay Patel

Here Young presents another rarity, Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied or Song of Lamentation, a cantata with a libretto of his own devising, the composer delving into Clemens Brentano’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn and the tales collected by the brothers Grimm. While Mahler revised this work extensively over the years (as was typical for the composer), the first version was completed in 1880 when he was just 19 years old – he later referred...