Mahler – Symphony No.6 in A minor
Performances of Mahler’s Sixth have, in recent years, seemed rather thinly spread – both in the concert hall and on disc. This year, however, has seen something of a renaissance of both (almost a flock of recordings) and that has particularly cheered me – although perhaps not for the many others who find this Mahler symphony his most difficult and unapproachable. I think it is his greatest – and most perfect – symphony.
I largely agree that Mahler’s Sixth can be a gruelling experience. Herbert von Karajan thought it exactly that to conduct, so why not to listen to as well? The level of ‘gruel’ really depends on whether you get a merely good or a great Mahler Sixth and, unique to this Mahler symphony, how the two middle movements are placed in order. Here we got Scherzo–Andante – correct, in my view, since this symphony is largely based on the premise of its collapse from A minor to A major. If we also accept that this symphony is less fatalist and nihilist than it is sometimes assumed to be it is easier to see the concept of the (Richard) ‘Straussian’ hero soaring in the vast final movement, only to felled by three blows of Fate. It is true that the music is graphically unyielding in its portrait of human mortality but in the greatest performances of this symphony the hero’s fall is subtly implied through the terror and horror of what the conductor does with his orchestra, although the hero is more often rendered with dramatic colour. But if there is no tragedy at the end of this vast work, what purpose has the gruel served?
I have not heard the BBC SO play Mahler in recent years but it became quite apparent a few minutes into this performance that they had not entirely thrown off the ghosts of Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in this composer, although I am sure there would have been very few players in this particular Mahler Sixth who had played under both conductors. Boulez was especially notable: tempo adjustments were rife (and not always managed successfully by the strings), precision was initially wayward, intonation in the woodwind sharp, and the brass had a tendency to harshness. Much, of course, lay at the feet of the conductor, Sakari Oramo, who took the opening bars at a very brisk tempo (no Barbirolli trudge in sight here, but nor a perfect march either) and seemed focused – lasered perhaps – on a view that terror was the journey to take. What was missing here was a soaring second theme and a sense that the hero of the first movement was somewhat lacking in drama and passion, although the scale of what we hearing certainly didn’t lack tension. Whatever the shortcomings at the beginning of this performance, Oramo tightened the screws enough to give us powerhouse sonorities even if the return of the first theme felt, well, undercooked.
If there had been a nihilist tendency in the first movement, there was little respite in the Scherzo which felt even more overdriven – a case of Faustian horror entirely twisted into a kind of musical carnage. Accents were sharp (and at triple metre impressively played), brass roared and snarled, and the woodwind seethed with swaggering brilliance. Taken together, the first two movements had put our hero through literal Hell, although one might argue that the briskness of Oramo’s tempo left little room to develop the full rite of passage he is to face before the final movement begins.
What happened after the Scherzo was simply remarkable. One might have expected a rather straightforward, even hurried, reading of the Andante; we got rather the opposite. There was a richness in the strings, a flow that was fluid and lyrical – although antiphonal strings would have gone a long way towards balancing the evenness of tone (and the muddiness we had heard at the opening of the Allegro). Given the blistering impact of the first half of the symphony the languid poignancy here was a revelation. As with so many performances of this symphony, the climax of this movement lacked weight – despite Oramo using ten double basses (if you want to hear how it should be done listen to the recordings by Fabio Luisi with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande or Yevgeny Svetlanov and the NHKSO).
The final movement, in all its vastness and shattering impact, was gloriously done. There were many notable things here. If it perhaps seemed a little hard driven, it had an ominous terror threaded through it that never came unstitched. Some things were very clear: the three hammer blows of Fate were dynamically correct (the first louder than the second, for example); the timpani were ferocious, the brutal violence of the Fate strokes as powerful as I have ever heard them. If Oramo was sending our hero into purgatory or towards the brink of catastrophe there was no question we were hearing this. The entire structure of this movement was carved from granite; there was overpowering weight, but it was also chilling to the bone. The final climax just dissolved into desolation.
This was, I think, a paradox of a performance. This was a Mahler Sixth that began in a maelstrom of terror that evoked little of the hero’s struggles he was to have faced; it inexorably built up to one of the grimmest and bleakest endings to this symphony I can remember. From playing that began rocky and uncertain, it became distinguished by an orchestra that was compellingly dramatic and perceptive in its narrative. Perhaps there was not so much gruel in this particular Mahler Sixth; rather, at the end a feeling one had been put through the emotional wringer. A not inconsiderable Sixth to satisfy the lust of most Mahlerians, I think.
This performance can be heard on BBC Sounds for a limited time.
Marc Bridle