The full transcripts of our Mahler interviews with Jonathan Nott and Kent Nagano are now available.

“Mahler expresses life’s reality.”

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

Nagano: The first time I heard Gustav Mahler’s music was indirectly through the television. I was a very young boy, and it was in the early 1960s, and I heard the second movement of the 1st Symphony explained, and then conducted, by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. And it was on a very, well, what now has become a very famous television series, called The Young Persons Concerts, and for many children like myself, who lived in rural America, far away from the big cities, where we didn’t have regular access to big symphony orchestras and big opera houses, this was a tremendous outreach programme. And using high technology at the time – television – that Mr. Bernstein employed, so that he could somehow share with a very, very broad public of young people the very special qualities of music. So in this particular broadcast it was, as I said, the second movement of the 1st Symphony: maestro Bernstein explained in a very general analysis on the piano, and then we heard the second movement. I must have been 8 years old at this time. (more…)