Set List | 'Symphony No.6 in A Minor', Mahler |
Performance Notes | If the Ninth Symphony is Mahlers musical dark night of the soul, then the Sixth is the afternoon, dark with storm clouds, that preceded it.
Although written at the happiest time of the composers life, the work builds gradually into a shattering frenzy of despair. The hero, wrote Mahler, is assaulted by three hammer-blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled. It was a musical vision that was to prove all too prescient for a composer who would soon suffer a series of life-changing personal heartbreaks.
The Sixth Symphony is a Viennese work, and who better to champion it than the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted here in the first of its two appearances this season by regular collaborator Daniel Harding.
There was no interval. |
Related Archival Material | Proms Guide (RAHE/1/2017/47a), Programme (RAHE/1/2017/117), Mini Guide (RAHE/6/2017/36), Posters (RAHE/2/2017/28, 32) |