There must have been a lot of cash slopping around in the music world in Mahler’s day. Imagine taking a new work to a symphony management today and saying “I’ve got this hour and a half long piece that needs a star mezzo and three choirs for about ten minutes. Fancy giving it a shot? Oh and it needs a bazillion players in the brass section.” Anyway that’s Mahler’s 3rd symphony for you and the TSO did it last night with Jamie Barton as soloist and the ladies of three choirs plus a children’s chorus. All in all it had far too much of the Mahler I don’t much care for; repetitively bombastic, and not enough of the kind I do; the bits with a kind of ethereal transcendent beauty. And it really goes on a bit. The last movement in particular has so many climaxes, and anti climaxes, that, at the end, the audience weren’t sure that it was really, finally over. I’ll take the 2nd or the 8th or one of the shorter pieces over this one anytime.
The lunchtime concert series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre kicks off on Tuesday with the traditional opener; a concert by the members of the COC Ensemble Studio. It’s always a good opportunity to level set for the season ahead. Noon in the RBA. Then on Wednesday and Thursday at 8pm the TSO are doing Mahler 3 with Jamie Barton as soloist. I was tremendously impressed with 
This looks like the week the season really starts. The big event is the season opener at the TSO on Wednesday where Renée Fleming is featured. There’s Ravel’s Shéhérazade plus Puccini, Walton and others finishing up with three numbers from The King and I. This one’s at Roy Thomson Hall at the slightly unusual time of 7pm. The next night at the Alliance Française there’s a show called Singing Stars of Tomorrow. It features ten young singers who will have been engaged in a day long workshop with Sondra Radvanovsky. It’s organised by the IRCPA. Tickets are $25 from 
The crazy late April/early May rush seems to be pretty much over. This coming week there are only a few performances of note. On Tuesday in the RBA at noon Aviva Fortunata and Iain MacNeil perform Strauss’ Four Last Songs and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. Thursday sees the opening of Against the Grain’s A Little Too Cozy at the CBC’s Studio 42. Then on Friday 13th, the TSO are doing, appropriately enough, Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony which sets Yevtushenko poems about the Babi Yar massacres.
The very busy spring season continues for another couple or three weeks before we head into the summer lull. This afternoon sees the final Songmasters concert of the season at the Royal Conservatory with the Hungarian-Finnish connection. Soprano Leslie Ann Bradley, bass-baritone Stephen Hegedus, pianists Rachel Andrist and Robert Kortgaard and violinist Erika Raum will perform Kaija Saariaho’s Changing Light as well as works by Liszt, Bartók, Sibelius, and others. That’s at 2pm in Mazzoleni Hall.
The TSO’s New Creations Festival wrapped up last night at Roy Thomson Hall with a concert featuring Brett Dean’s suite Knocking at the Hellgate, drawn from his 2004 opera Bliss. But first came a piece by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Water is a tone poem (if one can still use that term) inspired by soome lines from Philip Larkin:
operaramblings 