[Roth] goes at the crazy world of the Third with all wind and brass guns blazing…He isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty with the raggle-taggle marchers of the first movement. Even the trombone sounds more like a raw force of nature than a sophisticated funeral master…Roth shows he can do serious too, with mezzo Sara Mingardo symbolic of the performance as a whole: not an unearthly oracle but a feeling human being.*****

With a first movement majoring on local colour and fresh-faced charm, Francois-Xavier Roth leaves Mahler’s potentially laboured metaphysics to take care of themselves in later movements… There is a Wunderhorn-style warmth and energy to her singing that leads us naturally into the fifth movement’s angelic tableau (beautifully sonorous bells, boys and girls too).

Roth and the Cologne orchestra have a knack of making the most familiar Mahler sound new, with vivid extremes of colour and dynamics. Hearing the prodigious Third makes me marvel afresh at it, and at the stupidity of critics who were deaf to its greatness

Timbres matter a lot to Roth...and the detailed interplay of colours and solo lines stand out spectacularly...He and his talented Cologne musicians neither wallow nor preen, they simply let the music speak, expertly navigating the extended first movement’s shifting moods and letting the final slow movement’s measured crescendo reach its peak without any prodding.