Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor 'Tragic'

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By keeping a firm grip on the first three movements, Osmo Vänskä ensures that the cast and increasingly frantic finale, with its hammer-blows of Fate, really does come over as climactic, culminating... — BBC Music Magazine, July 2018, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 27th Apr 2018
Catalogue No: BIS2266
Label: BIS
Series: Osmo Vänskä Mahler Symphonies
Length: 86 minutes

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Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor 'Tragic'

Work length1:26:46

Album only

Minnesota Orchestra
Osmo Vänskä
Recorded: November 2016
Recording Venue: Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, United States

I. Allegro energico, ma non troppo. Heftig, aber markig

Track length24:53

Album only

II. Andante moderato

Track length16:19

Album only

$5.15

$7.00

III. Scherzo. Wuchtig

Track length13:22

$2.05

$3.85

$5.25

IV. Finale. Allegro moderato - Allegro energico

Track length32:12

Album only

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Albert Camus once wrote ‘when I describe what the catastrophe of modern man looks like, music comes into my mind – the music of Gustav Mahler’. If asked to specify a particular work, it is quite possible that Camus would have proposed Symphony No. 6 in A minor – the symphony that Bruno Walter claimed portrayed ‘a terrifying, hopeless darkness, without a human sound’. Nevertheless, the period during which Mahler wrote his Sixth was one of the most successful and happiest of his life – prior to any marital difficulties, at the time of the birth of his second daughter Anna, his professional reputation growing.

Alma Mahler, in her memoirs, suggested that the symphony was in fact predicting instances of future distress in the composer’s own life, and she and various commentators have proposed various interpretations of different elements. Most famous of these are possibly the hammer strokes in the Finale, falling, according to Alma, like ‘blows of fate’ on the ‘hero’ of the symphony.

But Osmo Vänskä has a reputation for engaging with even the most iconic scores at face value, avoiding preconceived ideas and ‘time-honoured’ 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) and ‘an exceptional performance that promises great things to come’ (allmusic.com).

Reviews

July 2018

By keeping a firm grip on the first three movements, Osmo Vänskä ensures that the cast and increasingly frantic finale, with its hammer-blows of Fate, really does come over as climactic, culminating in a last A minor blast and fade of annihilating intensity…The work’s opening is crisp and disciplined rather than lumpen…A welcome and convincing reappraisal of a difficult, not to say extreme score.

13th May 2018

The Finnish maestro opts for the revised order of middle movements, the searing andante preceding the scherzo, with its “old fatherly”, Ländler-like trio. The Minnesotans shine in the eerie sonorities of the finale, building to another allegro energico, but ending, movingly, in the minor tonality.

Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor 'Tragic'

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