Against the present background of conflict it is hard to hear in Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony anything other than a tortured reflection on the human condition, more violent than benign. Even in the absence of irrefutable evidence that the description Tragic was originally Mahler's own, the sense of the artist wrestling with life's great existential questions was overwhelming. Certainly in this performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under its principal guest conductor, Joseph Swensen, there was an awesome inevitability about the outcome of this work, with its final hammer blows of fate.
Swensen is the complete musician: a virtuoso violinist and composer as well as conductor, ostensibly well suited to Mahler. From the very first sinister opening march, his approach was one of taut, thrusting vigour, and while the music is shot through with melodic material that represents glimpses of a soaring but seemingly unattainable joy, this mitigated little against the overall impression of a relentless underlying force. In the scherzo too (played as the second of the four movements, thus eschewing the controversy that Mahler himself effectively began by re-ordering the central sequence) the highly imaginative instrumental colouring and the sardonic humour was quickly submerged in a harsher reality. Only in the central andante did Swensen's brisk demeanour alter, the desire to create a deeply lyrical sound bringing out the performer in him, arms as though embracing his fiddle, his baton a bow lovingly drawn over the strings, a gesture whose intimacy characterised the nature of Swensen's rapport with the players.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Swensen's interpretation was his underlining of the Mahler who stands between the two extremes of the Viennese schools. The constant pull between major and minor tonalities became the focus of blistering tension, while in the sweetly sonorous wind choirs, the simultaneously abrasive dissonances pointed up the composer's acquaintance with the new sound world of Schoenberg and Berg. Implicit in every emotion was an acute consciousness of its opposite, so that light and dark, hope and despair, were facets of the same state of being.
All the more chilling then, when Mahler is compelled to end the work in the minor, with no redemption. Swensen couldn't put a different complexion on that.
