“Mahler must have been a great man!”

Mr. Blomstedt, do you remember when you heard Mahler’s music for the first time?

Blomstedt: I think so. It was the 1st Symphony and I didn’t like it particularly. I was 14 or 15 and I thought it was vulgar. It was in Gothenburg. I am sure it was very well played by Issay Dobrowen, but I was right in my Bach/Beethoven late quartets phase of my development, so anything that diverged too much from that I felt was not really worth my attention [laughs]. It took quite a few years before I realized that this was great music.

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To celebrate the Mahler anniversary years 2010 and 2011, as well as the conductor’s 70th birthday, Christoph Eschenbach and the Orchestre de Paris have made high definition video recordings of the Mahler series they presented this season available online.

All symphonies as well as the interview Christoph Eschenbach gave to Universal Edition are now online.

See the concerts online

“Mahler completely knocked me sideways … and that’s the reason why I’m a conductor today.”

Do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

I am not sure. I grew up in Liverpool when they were doing what was actually the first European Mahler-cycle with the same orchestra and conductor. It’s extraordinary to think of that – this was the middle of the ‘60s. But no-one in Europe had played all the symphonies with the same conductor at this time. It had only been done in Utah, by the Utah Symphony Orchestra. And look – one forgets how off-centre Mahler was at this time, before Bernstein, before etc. etc. Berthold Goldschmidt had only just performed the Mahler Third for the first time in Britain; that was in 1962. I have still a magnificent tape of that. So, Sir Charles Groves and the Liverpool Philharmonic, they did two a year for five and a half years, because they also did Das Lied von der Erde, they also did the early version of the completed Tenth. And I can remember, because I was studying: violin with one player in the orchestra, percussion with another, and they said: “Ah! We’re on our twice-yearly struggle with Mahler”.

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