The decision to perform and record the 'Symphony of a Thousand' in St Paul's Cathedral required some nerve. A few months before the scheduled performances - as part of the City of London Festival - we took Valery Gergiev to St Paul's to give him an idea of what he was letting himself in for. We walked in on a bright spring morning and Gergiev was shocked. 'Oh my god - is this possible?' was the essence of his reaction.


But, as the musical world well knows, Gergiev is not one to duck a challenge. Once over the initial shock he quickly understood the potential the building offered for an extraordinary event and involved himself in the planning, looking for an orchestral, choral and soloist layout which would, on the one hand convey the complex scale of the work and on the other allow him the best contact with the performers.

St Paul's is famous for an acoustic that rolls on into the middle of next week. Gergiev realised immediately that the way to build a great performance was to work with the acoustic rather than try to tame it.
The best way to work with the acoustic was to follow rigorously the dynamic road map provided by Mahler in the score. Mahler - the master orchestrator - had already foreseen the problems and provided the means of solving them.


The challenge for the recording crew was similarly to find a way of working with the acoustic of St Paul's to recreate the ideal balance between the monumental and the intimate. This involved not just recording an exceptional performance of the symphony but also capturing a sense of the astonishing space in which it was performed.