It is expected of any arts organisation that they will launch their new season with a big statement, and they don’t come much bigger than one of Gustav Mahler’s all-encompassing symphonies.

Sydney Symphony Orchestra Chief Conductor Simone Young has weaved the magic Mahler wand since she started her tenure during the COVID lockdowns, celebrating the reopening of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall after its remake fittingly with the No. 2 Resurrection Symphony, moving on last year to the ever-popular Fifth.

This season it was the turn of the Third – the longest of the canon – the six movements of which, played through without an interval, clocks in at one hour and 45 minutes, with the first movement alone about the length of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.

Simone Young conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Third Symphony. Photo © Jay Patel

In this work Mahler, as ever, sets out to encompass the world – life, love, death, heaven (no hell), nature and the spectacular Alpine scenery surrounding the summer holiday home where he composed during his breaks from his hectic conducting...