Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor is the symphony that conductor Bruno Walter found to portray ‘a terrifying, hopeless darkness, without a human sound’. Nevertheless, the time period during which Mahler wrote his Sixth was one of the most successful and happiest of his life. This was a time prior to any marital difficulties, a time of the birth of his second daughter Anna, and a period during which his professional reputation was growing.
Mahler’s wife, Alma, in her memoirs, suggested that the symphony was in fact predicting instances of future distress in the composer’s own life, and she proposed various interpretations of different elements. Most famous of these are possibly the hammer strokes in the Finale of this work, falling like ‘blows of fate’ on the ‘hero’ of the symphony.
Conductor Osmo Vänskä has a reputation for engaging with even the most iconic scores at face value, avoiding preconceived ideas and ‘time-honored’ traditions. His and the Minnesota Orchestra’s recording of Mahler’s Sixth follows upon the 2017 release of the composer’s Fifth Symphony. Nominated to a 2018 Grammy Award, that interpretation has been described as ‘at once committed and detached, intense and transcendentally timeless’ (Norman Lebrecht).
Here is the Finale from this recording:
