Mahler’s Symphony No 8 dazzles Hong Kong under Tarmo Peltokoski’s baton

Describing his life-affirming Symphony No 8, composer Gustav Mahler told lyricist and writer Richard Specht in 1906 that he had completed the huge score in a feverish two months. “It was like a lightning vision – I saw the whole piece immediately before my eyes and only needed to write it down, as though it were being dictated to me,” he said. Representing a paradigm shift in his symphonic style and sung from beginning to end, Mahler’s epic eighth in E-flat major was unprecedented, fusing two...