Thomas Hampson launches the 2012-13 season of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande singing music by the composer with whom he is perhaps most closely associated: Gustav Mahler.  Hampson, along with tenor Paul Groves, joins the orchestra and its Music and Artistic director, Neeme Järvi, for two concerts (September 13 and 14) in Geneva’s Victoria Hall featuring the Austrian composer’s valedictory Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).  This unique and transcendent “song-symphony,” featuring texts of Chinese poetry translated into German, with additional texts by Mahler himself, explores nothing less than the meaning of life, from the innocent joys of youth to the inevitable parting from this world.  True to the work’s inspiration, Mahler infuses the orchestral sound with many evocative Eastern touches.  Hampson recorded “Das Lied” in 1995 with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and again in 2007 with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.