Just before the first concert on Jan. 13 that year, he said, “It’s crazy,” the craziness being that he was about to attempt something beyond reason: performing all nine completed Mahler symphonies and ...

Give Mahler a cheery nursery-rhyme ditty and he’ll turn it into the bleakest of gallows marches. Don’t believe us? Have a listen to the opening of the third movement of the First Symphony.