Tragic and catastrophic are the words most often used to describe Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Yet, in this performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and in the context of the US presidential inauguration just hours earlier, the work carried a newly cataclysmic resonance and foreboding that made for a shattering experience.
In conversation with Sibelius in Helsinki in 1907, the year after his revision of his sixth, Mahler expressed the belief that “the symphony must be like the world. It must encompass everything”. He could not have envisaged the way this particular symphony – with its extremes of violence and tender pastoral idyll – would speak so directly of the world’s predicament over the next century and beyond. Nor could Thomas Søndergård, BBC NOW’s principal conductor, when first embarking on this Mahler cycle, have predicted how potently the shrill, insistent, manic instability of the Scherzo (following the consoling Andante) would here mirror the present. Søndergård’s controlled sustaining of the long finale made it unremitting, with the two fateful hammer-blows and the trombone and tuba’s funerary tones sounding all the more nihilistic. The orchestra played out of their skins.
By way of preface, the BBC National Chorus of Wales, conducted by Adrian Partington, had sung four a cappella motets by Bruckner, cited by Mahler as his forerunner. The vast contrasts of dynamic and mood were beautifully realised, albeit with some over-eager tenors, but these motets belonged to a past, whereas Mahler felt like now.
- Broadcast on Radio 3 on 27 January.
