Prom 62: Rattle conducts Mahler’s Sixth

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 6 in A minor

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle
conductor

1903-04, revised 1906. 1,950 bars. Deryck Cooke, magisterial Mahlerian of an era, considered the wordless, programme-less Sixth to be Mahler’s “most classical symphony”, the “only” instance in his output of “a four movement orchestral work centered on one key: A minor sonata-allegro, E flat andante, A minor scherzo, and [C minor-A minor palindromic] rondo-finale”. Resisting fanciful digression, he encapsulated its incidents and currents perspicaciously. “A truly tragic catastrophe, akin to those in Greek and Shakespearean drama, is presented with stark objectivity. And woven into it is a Hardy-like backcloth of nature, of mountain heights, far above human turmoil. This acts as a refuge in the slow movement, but in the first movement and the finale as a purely elemental world, indifferent to human suffering.” 

For Simon Rattle the Sixth represents “the whole package of a colossal life”, “love and optimism” included. He’s lived with it for forty years, honing and maturing his reading from his Berliner Philhamoniker debut in November 1987, through his 1989 CBSO EMI recording, to his new post-LSO orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, beginning with his second trilogy of concerts opening the 2023/24 season following the demise of Mariss Jansons in 2019 (live-recorded, BR-Klassik 900217). Deepening understanding hasn’t been at the expense of tempo. Confining himself largely to tensioning/relaxing subtleties of phrasing, rubato and colour, a stretch here, a tightening there, his overall duration has always been in much the same ball park – 86 minutes. Quicker, this Prom ran out at 82 minutes music-time, 83.33 minutes performance-time including movement breaks (free of applause). With one of Germany’s super elite orchestras at his disposal – more than a hundred strong, Siberian-born Anton Barakhovsky leading, no solo, no section without class and quality, anything possible, no dynamic beyond realisation (the quietest moments daringly  sustained), precision and ensemble scarcely compromised (just a passing touch or two of ‘covered’ untidiness in the lowest registers) – Rattle, from memory, launched into the music with characteristic fervour, especially fluent in the first movement (with exposition repeat) and Scherzo (its challenging shifting sands unfolding convincingly). The raised emotional temperature of the Andante (faster than his Birmingham account: might subsequent Berlin outings have encouraged that shift?) was telling. The finale wended its journey to piano nothingness, two cyclopean hammer blows en route, figs. 129fff and140 ff, “like the stroke of a hatchet”. (A third, bar 783, vaunted by Bernstein, Mahler deleted in the second edition.)

Familiar landmarks came and passed. Tramping marches, lyrical counter-melodies, the leitmotif major/minor chords (thinly balanced minor thirds notwithstanding), vistas of calm and calamity, cosmic sonics, kettledrums relentless in their stud-nailed motto destiny. Acknowledging Mahler’s change of order at the 1906 Essen premiere (endorsed by his student Charles Adler in his 1952 Vienna recording and maintained by Mitropoulos in Carnegie Hall three years later) we were reminded of Rattle’s (by extension Cooke’s) preferred Andante/Scherzo sequencing, reversing the first edition’s Scherzo/Andante groundplan – a divergent issue (Webern, on the dubious authority of Mahler’s widow Alma, favouring the original design, similarly, much later, Boulez, Haitink, Horenstein and Kubelík) but one with notable contemporary advocacy (down, albeit contested, to the 2010 Neue Kritische Gesamtausgabe approbating it).

With antiphonal violins, harps and side-drum positioned at ten o’clock, basses at two o’clock, and the percussion battery ranged high from centre to left of stage, this was a performance that had one cheering and stamping long and loud, orchestra partaking. Occasionally, I have to admit, I wondered if Rattle wasn’t perhaps trying/driving/shaping/controlling just a bit too hard, over-winding the “sublime chaos” spring, reluctant to loosen his grip and let the music speak for itself, plainly and directly. Classically. There’s a limit to how many ocean breakers you can ride, how many cataclysms you can live through, how many languishing havens you can indulge. No matter. The journey was a privilege.