in cooperation with BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
Programme
Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 6 95 min.
Goethe-Institut invites the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to its auditorium in a digital format with high definition video live-streaming for the connoisseurs of Western classical music of Chennai. The Digital Concert Hall with excellent sound and video is the best close-to-real experience one can get.
In November 1987, a promising conductor made his Berliner Philharmoniker debut with Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: Sir Simon Rattle. Today in retrospect Rattle says, “I felt that I was finding my voice on that day.” With the same Mahler’s multifaceted work on the programme, Sir Simon Rattle gave his last concert in the Berlin Philharmonie as the orchestra’s chief conductor. The exploration of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic oeuvre represents a constant in the now 30 year-long artistic collaboration of Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker. The wheel has now completed a full circle.
In ‘Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters’, the composer’s widow wrote, ‘written between 1903 and 1905 no work flowed as directly from his heart as this,” and added that the Sixth was ‘the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one too’. For Mahler, a symphony is the construction of a world with all the available technical means and the encounter with the cosmos in Mahler’s music begins in the streets and ends in infinity.
On the surface, Mahler’s Sixth appears to be more committed to the classical genre tradition than any other of the composer’s symphonies: it is in four movements and has a clear, harmonic disposition.
Mahler reported to a friend at the beginning of September 1904: “My Sixth is finished. – So am I!”
Nevertheless, Mahler was convinced his Sixth would pose enigmatic riddles that can be solved only by a generation that has assimilated and digested his first five symphonies. Mahler’s Sixth was indeed to prove to be the work that initially caused the greatest difficulties to posterity due to the complex structure of its movements and its new forms of expression.
The premiere, conducted by the composer had undertaken numerous alterations, largely affecting not only the instrumentation and performing indications but also the sequence of inner movements. The lyrical slow movement is brought forward, which functions as an oasis of tranquility. Instead of ending in victory or transfiguration, the Sixth Symphony concludes in blackness and hopelessness, a last attempt to achieve fulfilment. In this configuration, the work was performed directed by the composer himself, and it will be heard in this form at today’s concert as well.
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