Houston Symphony music director Juraj Valcuha leads the orchestra in Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony at Jones Hall for the Performing Arts in Houston on March 16, 2024.Within a mere two months, between January and March, three of Gustav Mahler’s middle symphonies will have been performed by three of Texas’ top orchestras. In, as it happens, reverse order. In what has come to seem a defining test of orchestras and conductors, more Mahler is on the way.
The order of the symphony’s two middle movements is controversial. Mahler’s original score and first publication put the turbulent scherzo first, followed by the slow movement. But during rehearsals for his first performances, Mahler reversed the order and ultimately asked his publisher to indicate the revised sequence.Ever since, each of the two options has had its advocates among scholars and conductors; recordings have been almost equally divided.
I can’t remember hearing the Scherzo started at such a driven tempo, but Valcuha left no doubt of the music’s savagery — and grotesquerie. The contrasting trio, with its playfully shifting meters, had the appropriately light touch.Elements tender, menacing and ecstatic were vividly realized in the finale, with an enormous wooden mallet delivering the two awesome hammer blows indicated in the score.
Mahler, who lived from 1860 to 1911, just missed the horrors of World War I. But, living in Vienna for most of his last 14 years, he hardly could have ignored increasing multi-cultural tensions straining the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the same time, the city was exploding with intellectual and artistic innovation, with creative figures ranging from Sigmund Freud to the painter Gustav Klimt and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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