★★★★★
To get in training for this amazingly fresh account of Mahler’s Symphony No 3 from François-Xavier Roth, I recommend looking at the YouTube channel of the conductor’s German orchestra, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln. There you will find a live streaming of the interpretation presented on this album. You can also find an encore of Roth singing (sort of) Charles Trenet’s La Mer, although luckily that’s from a different concert. The valuable thing, though, is to study the close-ups of Roth conducting: the tight little movements of his fingers (no baton), the furrowed brow, the eyebrow shifts, the electric bolts that shake his body a flick of a second before the thunderstorm hits.
This is how he conjures up sounds so precise and crystal clear