Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in July are:
3-7 July Byrd
10-14 July Jaëll
17-21 July Barber
24-28 July Tailleferre
31 July – 4 August Anniversary Special: Composers in Conversation
Sometimes the music really is like the man – the one the composer Ethel Smyth compared to ‘a bomb cased in razor-edges’. Listening to Mahler’s music, and especially to those huge, outrageously ambitious symphonies, can be like being at the centre of a controlled explosion. But Smyth is describing Mahler’s ‘work face’ – the face he adopted for coercing, seducing, even terrifying singers and orchestral musicians in pursuit of his vision. There was also Mahler the doting father, Mahler the meditative, exultant Alpine walker and cyclist, the Mahler whose exquisite song from , ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, reveals him ‘lost… in my heaven, in my love, in my song’, who famously described his symphonies as ‘like the world’,
