I love the intimacy of chamber music, both playing and listening to it. It is an ideal musical format for the expression and sharing of personal feelings and emotions. Nothing, however, can compete with the symphony for its ability to express the heights, the depths, the power of the human spirit. The greatest early exponent was, of course, Beethoven. His modern counterpart, who can claim equally to be unsurpassed in this artform, is Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911). Mahler bridges the period between late romanticism and modernism and his grand scale symphonies lie open to wide interpretations both by musicians and audiences.  The philosophical meaning expressed by them has been the subject of constant debate because their subject matter - the human spirit - is such an intangible, compelling subject.

A symphony can be described as music, usually for full orchestra - strings, wind, brass and percussion - in several movements. The first, for example, may be an allegro, in what is called (confusingly) "sonata form". This means that a theme is announced and played.  Then a second theme, often in a different but closely related key, is played.  The two themes can then be developed in the "exposition" section, before both return to the home key to be repeated in the final section of the movement.  Other movements follow, with, perhaps, a slow movement, then commonly in classical times a minuet and trio, or more recently the popular "scherzo", before the grand finale.

I've been listening this month to the five movements of Mahler's Seventh Symphony (read my review of a new CD of this work). A characteristic of Mahler's grand-scale symphonic works that has always struck me is the contrast they contain between the depth of the music in terms of its scoring and expression and what every now and then appear to be really trite offerings, little tunes that spring up out of nowhere and seem perhaps to hark back to the composer's early life. You can imagine him wandering around as a youth, coming across a snippet played by a street musician, a hurdy gurdy, or a child's skipping game. Everything has subsequently gone into the matured music, all the experiences of growing up as an individual, and all the high and low experiences of being a member of the human race - microcosm and macrocosm combined. Mahler's symphonies are a great melting pot into which everything is put and cooked up to produce a magical, musical feast. This suggests to me that symphonic music is akin to an alchemical process, where raw material is put into the alchemist's alembic, heated and stirred until a new and miraculous substance is created.