Philadelphia Orchestra Performs Mahler at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 21 April 2025 13:21

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee.

At the outstanding Stern Auditorium, on the night of Tuesday, April 15th, I had the tremendous pleasure of attending a superb performance of Gustav Mahler’s glorious Symphony No. 6 in A Minor—in its final, 1906 revision—played by the extraordinary Philadelphia Orchestra under the stellar direction of the inestimable Yannick Nézet-Séguin. (The concert, which continues a strong season of orchestral music at the venue, was presented by Carnegie Hall.)

In a valuable note on the program, Christopher H. Gibbs records that:

Mahler performed his Sixth just three times. The printed program for the last performance in Vienna carried the title “Tragic.” (It was not so named in the manuscript, at the premiere, or in the published editions released during his lifetime.) 

The eminent conductor Bruno Walter, a close associate of the composer, had this to say about the work:

It reeks of the bitter cup of human life. In contrast with the Fifth, the Sixth says “No,” above all in its last movement, where something resembling the inexorable strife of “all against all” is translated into music. “Existence is a burden; death is desirable and life hateful” might be its motto.

And, in a letter to the critic Richard Specht, Mahler wrote: “My Sixth will pose puzzles which can only be broached by a generation which has imbibed and digested my first five.”

The turbulent initial movement—marked Allegro energico, ma non troppo—begins urgently, propulsively, forcefully and suspensefully with a recurring, dramatic, funeral march; a more subdued passage ushers in a surge of contrasting, Romantic lyricism that too returns as the movement unfolds. The movement, which is not without engaging eccentricities and which builds to a stunning apotheosis, contains more tentative, reflective and interior interludes—the first with pastoral elements (bells) that reappear in the third and fourth movements. Gibbs comments on these, quoting the composer:

He indicates that they “must be treated very discreetly—in realistic imitation of the higher and lower bells of a grazing herd, sounding from afar, sometimes combined, sometimes singly,” and then tellingly adds: “It must be expressly stated that this technical remark allows no programmatic interpretation.”

The ensuing Scherzo is a thrilling, almost menacing, march-like Ländler; its marvelous Trio is more playful, even ingenuous. The movement has many surprising, even extravagant, developments; it closes quietly, if quirkily.

The annotator reports that “Arnold Schoenberg praised the ‘curious structure’ of the beautiful melody that opens the Andante moderato.” It opens hauntingly with an exquisite flow of unusual, thematic inspirations—a gentle joyousness shines throughout it and it is arguably the loveliest of the symphony’s four movements. The music intensifies but the movement concludes very softly and serenely.

Walter’s view of the unwieldy, inordinately anfractuous, Allegro moderato Finale was as:

...the mounting tensions and climaxes [that] resemble, in their grim power, the mountainous waves of a sea that will overwhelm and destroy the ship ... The work ends in hopelessness and the dark night of the soul. Non placet is his verdict on this world; the “other world” is not glimpsed for a moment.

The movement starts portentously, if somewhat inchoately, with diverse musical ideas that evolve in unexpected ways, sometimes tumultuously, sometimes evoking a bucolic reverie. (The famous hammer blows in the movement were specified by the composer to be ”short, mighty, but dull in resonance, with a non-metallic character, like the stroke of an ax.") The symphony’s brilliant ending is simultaneously and paradoxically hushed and emphatic.

The artists, deservedly, were enthusiastically applauded.

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