The moment I heard the first sounds of Mahler's 3^rd Symphony, brought with an authoritarian, surgically precise gesture, on Friday, March 25th 2011, in the performance hall of the Romanian Athenaeum, by the conductor Camil Marinescu, I wondered what was the composer thinking when he wrote this work, which unveils beauty with each of its moments , unbinding your fibres one by one, only to bring them back together in absolute astonishment, which leaves you, as Ionel Teodorescu said, opened as a joyful wound. How can such a deeply touching work exist and not be written by either Bach or Mozart?

A Panorama of Life

Mahler's 3rd Symphony is a panorama of life: the fear that paralyses you, a wedding ceremony, a windswept dress and straw hat on a warm Summer day, a merry-go-round at the fair, moments of hesitation when one has to take a decision, fulfilled prophecy of parricide, Kafka's penal colony, the barrel organ and circus music in Fellini's films. And these are only the 1^st part !

Then, a gracious work of Mozart greets us, as the author would have composed it in 1890, together with a Nutcracker, from a time when not even the children believed in fairy tales; the music goes on as a soundtrack of classic cartoons, slowly degrading into something violent and continuing afterwards as sounds which represent a spaceship flying around the moon. The 4th part, having a pianissimo beginning when you are afraid even to breath, is the one in which the soloist voice sings; in this case, Carolina Masur's voice seemed to have been there the entire time, and the fact that you clearly heard it at a particular moment, was because your thoughts had been somewhere else. It is also moment when the women's voices from the Philharmonic Chorus, the Children's Radio Chorus and the Choir from Dinu Lipatti Music High-school are very well heard. They were prepared by Iosif Ion Prunner, Voicu Popescu and Lăcrămioara Pauliuc. The end of Mahler's 3rd Symphony- a final silence, which cannot be followed by anything, transfigured in sonorous heights.

Camil Marinescu and the Infinity of the Conductor s Gestures

One might think the conductor's gestures are limited; there is a strict number of physical indications that one can give, the moves that one can do. But there is actually an infinity of them; none is repeated nor identical with the other. Ending or leading the music, the conductor Camil Marinescu has such a good control over the orchestra as if he kept it in his embrace; as if it were an instrument, a single one, which produces any type of music desired by him, every possible music. Both Mahler's 3rd Symphony and Camil Marinescu proved that music is, in fact, life.