Luogo e data di registrazione		Watford Town Hall, London (Gran Bretagna): - settembre 1986 (Symphonie No. 6) - aprile 1987 (Symphonie No. 10)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Günther Breest
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Editing		Werner Roth (Symphonie No. 6), Reinhild Schmidt (Symphonie No. 10)
	Prima Edizione LP		Deutsche Grammophon | 423 082-1 | LC 0173 | 2 LPs - 58' 34" & 67' 08" | (p) 1987 | Digital
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 423 082-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 58' 34" & 67' 08" | (p) 1987 | DDD
	Note		-

Symphonie No. 6 Since completing his Fourth Symphony in August 1900, the most important event in Mahler’s life had been his introduction, on 7 November 1901, to Alma Maria Schindler, whom he married four months later. Already he had begun work on the Fifth Symphony which he completed during their first summer holiday together. in Mahler's chalet at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee. The Fifth was a significant advance on the Fourth Symphony, though it too had its musical roots in what Donald Mitchell - from this end of the 20th-century - calls the "Wunderhorn years". It was with the Fifth Symphony that a new direction in Mahler’s musical thought was clearly discernible, and nowadays commentators tend to lump Symphonies 5, 6 and 7 together, as a sort of middle-period trilogy. Because Mahler was, in the early 1900s, composing songs to poems by Friedrich Rückert, and because music from these songs found a tenuous way into these three symphonies, Michael Kennedy (another recent and perceptive Mahler biographer) has called them his "Rückert symphonies". They do have in common certain musical and spiritual (also purely physical) qualities which stand out the more if one contrasts any of them with, on the one hand, the innocent serenity of the Fourth and on the other, the monumental symphonic organization and jubilant faith of the Eighth. But there are thematic cross-references throughout Mahler’s work, not just to the Wunderhorn and Rückert songs: indeed sometimes Mahler`s eleven symphonies (including Das Lied von der Erde) take on the aspect of one integral, thematically unified mega-symphony, a musical equivalent of, say, Homer`s Odyssey (twelve books to Mahlerßs eleven). The Sixth Symphony stands at the centre of the eleven, and it is the most classically restrained in form of them all, yet in content apparently highly autobiographical, an imaginary presage of personal doom, made at a time when the composer was healthy. happy, successful, married with two infant daughters and an idolized wife. She remembered him then as "a tree in full leaf and flower", at ease on holiday in glorious countryside, playing delightedly with his babies, rowing on the lake, swimming or sunbathing, rambling the fields and mountains in shabby old clothes. The literary content of the Sixth Symphony is there, chiefly in the Finale which postulates a hero upon whom fall “three hammer-blows of fate”, the third of which kills him. In the summers of 1903 and 1904, when Mahler respectively began and completed the work at Maiernigg, he had no inkling that three years later (when the Eighth Symphony was complete) those hammer-blows were to fall on him: his eldest daughter would die, he would be relieved of his prestigious post as artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera, and doctors would diagnose lesions in his heart whose prognosis was extremely unpromising, All Mahler’s music is partly autobiographical, not always about himself but about what he had seen and heard and experienced. The hammer-blows had fallen upon many others before who did not deserve them. His Kindertotenlieder were composed before he had lost any children of his own: he was moved by Rückert’s poems because one of the children commemorated was called Ernst, the name of a dear brother who died when Mahler was a child. It is more pertinent that in the summer of 1903, during first work on the Sixth Symphony, Mahler set another Rückert poem, Liebst du um Schönheit which, aside from the Fahrenden Gesellen set of nearly 20 years earlier, remained his only love-song, extremely touching and characteristic. Mahler also told his wife (an unreliable source of information, but here credible) that the second subject of this symphony’s first movement was intended as a portrait of her - or perhaps rather of Mahler’s consuming love for Alma, a more musical concept, though such a jealous wife may have feared it might be his love for an earlier flame. Mahler at first designated his Sixth as a “Tragic Symphony”; quite soon he removed the nickname, as he usually drew away attention from extra-musical references. He was right. Some extra-musical references in music cannot be ignored; but most music such as this was also composed with the intention that you and I will relate it to our own personal experiences, and thereby find our lives in some way enriched. We are likely to find Mahler’s Sixth a more sobering experience than, say, his Fifth or Seventh symphonies, though not without moments of calm and joy. I said that he completed it in the summer of 1904, but he continued to tinker with the orchestration until 1906 when he conducted the first performance during the Festival of the German Musicians’ Union at Essen on 27 May, having previously tried it out with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He revised it again in 1908, after the score had been published showing the slow movement placed third after the scherzo. Conductors ever since have exercised their personal prerogatives about the position of the middle movements, though the International Mahler Society of today has opted for Mahler’s finally expressed preference for his original intentions, the scherzo being placed second. (That is the sequence heard in this recording.) ***** Mahler’s childhood was spent in the countryside, near to a military barracks. Even after he became a city-dweller through his profession, his music returned continually to childhood memories. So this symphony begins with the sound of tramping feet, not a funeral march as in the Fifth Symphony, but a quick march, heavy in beat, eagle-eyed in authority, severe. The arrival of the first marchtune is so heavy that it bids fair to bring the regiment to a halt, so passionate, even hysterical, that the troops seem to vanish. But no, an instant later they are on the move again, in full voice though the tunes are several, often simultaneous, and too strenuously extended for any usual vocal compass, with trills and screeches and precipitous plunges, plenty of brass and drums. If too quick for a funeral, this march is sufficiently ominous to suggest the doomed and the damned. It disintegrates into a stern drum rhythm, above it a trumpet chord, major fading into minor, like the sudden passage from physical life to physical death, a motto of this symphony. A sort of wan chorale for woodwind, against remnants of the march, leads to the voluptuous outpouring of what (rightly or wrongly) is called the Alma theme, the movement`s second subject, grand, rich, clearly articulated, not just a flowing melody (though it is that, as well), even more sumptuous when repeated after a curious, perfectly prepared, reference to Liszt’s E flat piano concerto, hard to accept as coincidence since the musical atmosphere is similar - Liszt put words to his theme Das versteht ihr alle nicht (“None of you understands this”). Then this vital march of a theme subsides, and the initial march resumes, either with the repeated exposition indicated by Mahler, or by proceeding (pace Mahler devotees) straight to the development, bringing abrupt string glissandos at once, and the robust clink of the xylophone (a novelty for Mahler), diversely exploited for some time, while the march tune infiltrates the Alma melody, trying to conquer it in favour of more rhythmical, violent topics. Those are dispelled, contrariwise, by something else: the sound of remote cowbells, tinkling celesta, string tremolos, pastoral fanfares, which Mahler described as the most remote sound heard by a climber at the top of a mountain, viz earth as apprehended by those moving towards heaven. This was certainly a memory from Mahler’s extreme youth, rather than from holidays at Maiernigg, and it broadens the conspectus of the symphony’s content, bringing it into line with the whole of Mahler’s auditory life and creative work, I think (the cowbells will be heard again, and in later music by Mahler). The vision of earthly man’s nearest approach to Heaven continues until it is interrupted by a return of music derived from the initial quick march (especially the Liszt reference), becoming more and more intensive until the recapitulation which begins triumphantly in A major, as if victory were won - only to sink into expected A minor, for a far from literal re-statement of themes, so intense an energy have they set up. The coda begins in despair but again rises to triumph, through the inspiration of the Alma theme. The Scherzo also begins with loud pulsating basses, not for a march but a triple-time movement, belonging to devils rather than soldiers, grotesque and predatory in their glee (xylophone again). The harsh atmosphere is not far from that of the previous movement (one can appreciate why Mahler contemplated putting the slow movement here, in a contrasted key), but more burlesque and remorseless. A particularly insistent set of chords is to turn into the basis of the Scherzo’s trio section. almost at once. The repeated notes fade into a slower, gracious, “grandfatherly” (Mahler’s word) dance, very irregular in metre, decidedly comic. It looks forward to the second movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, back to that of the Second (a wholly convinced Ländler, as this is definitely not), and portrayed, if we trust Alma, the perilous first toddling by the lake of the Mahlers’ baby daughters. There are loud interruptions - adult rescue, or something quite else? The harsh Scherzo tries to return, but the Trio is resumed and optimistically extended, though its repeated notes turn sour before the Scherzo returns properly. The tottering children are sighted near the end, but quietly brushed away, not, I think, from superstitious pessimism, but rather because they were an episode, not part of the unpleasant main section of the movement. According to Mahler`s first and last thoughts, there now follows the slow movement, Andante in E flat major (musically the key most remote from A). We are back in idyllic countryside, near to the Alma world (also suggested in the Adagietto of Symphony 5, and in the penultimate song of Kindertotenlieder, in the Night-music movements of No. 7 as well). A rocking figure is involved, and a melancholy tune for cor anglais. These materials alternate gently, transformed by one another at each reappearance. The cowbells and celesta return too, to impress the rarified air still more closely upon the ear, and a considerable intensity will be created, leading to a release of Brahmsian calm sequences that ignite into something like passion before the gentle close. The slow movement ended in E flat major, whence it started. The Finale begins in C minor (same key-signature). Musical people will agree that the flat-keyed Andante belongs here rather than between two A minor movements, unless Mahler wanted violent key-contrasts, unlikely in a symphony so carefully classic and self-controlled in design. This now is the movement of tragedy, a sostenuto introduction with a C minor violin melody, compounded of hope and despair, including a clear reference to the Alma theme from the first movement, a back-reference to the major-minor Fate motto on trumpets with drum-thumps, a soft and markedly rhythmical groan for bass tuba (the clarinet skirl with it comes from the Scherzo), a horn call looking directly back to the Auferstehn theme of Mahler 2, then a soft and sombre chorale tune for wind and brass. We are close to the funerary. world of the Second Symphony. The major-minor trumpet motto warns again. The music stirs towards an Allegro tempo and a different quick-march, still linked with the first-movement ideas (and looking forward to the Eighth Symphony as well). Development comes thick and last, for old rather than new themes. This section IS interrupted by a return to the introductory music, now in D rather than C minor, unwillingly urged by its themes back to a fast tempo, Always the swirling introductory music, and the major-minor trumpet motto intervene, and the hammerblows, only twice: Mahler wrote the third blow into the score, but insisted that, being lethal, it must not be played. After the unheard third blow there remains only the coda, a slow fugato on the introductory theme whose aimless striving is cut short forever by the trumpet motto and the drum rhythm. The orchestra is huge, though sparely used; this is surely Mahler’s most succinct, self-contained symphony. William Mann Symphonie No. 10 Mahler’s principal energies during the summer of 1910 had to be concentrated on preparations for the forthcoming first performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich during September. He was however able to take a short holiday in his cottage at Toblach in the eastern Tyrol (he had given up Maiernigg when his daughter died), and there he sketched the five movements of his Tenth Symphony, and made a fair copy of the first movement in full score. His work was interrupted by his wife’s nervous breakdown and an ensuing crisis in their marriage, which prompted Mahler to consult the psychologist Siegmund Freud. The crisis was happily resolved, but Mahler had no more time to work at his Tenth Symphony: after the Munich performances of the Eighth, he needed to revise his Second and Fourth symphonies before returning to New York where the Philharmonic season, under his directorship, started in November. Before that season was over, Mahler fell ill with blood poisoning. He was shipped back to Europe, but died in a Vienna sanatorium on 18 May 1911. At first his widow clung secretively to the manuscript of the unfinished Tenth Symphony. In 1924 the musicologist Richard Specht persuaded her to have it published in facsimile, so that other musicians might learn from the drafts. Her son-in-law, the composer Ernst Křenek, prepared a performing edition of the first and third movements which were conducted in Vienna by Franz Schalk and Alexander Zemlinsky; all three made questionable adjustments to the scoring, as was shown when this score was published in the United States. The International Mahler Society in Vienna has now published the first movement - often loosely described as the Adagio though it is properly Andante and Adagio, the two tempi alternating - exactly as Mahler left it. This is frequently played on its own as here, a tantalizing sample of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. It proposes two ideas: the unaccompanied andante melody for violas, lonely and apparently meandering; then the rich, warm adagio melody for swooping violins underpinned by mysterious trombone chords, and given a more cheerful, dance-like pendant. The two groups of ideas alternate at first, each acquiring variants and new counterpoints (an early, durable variant is the discovery that the themes can effectively be stood on their heads, yet remain recognizable), until in the developmental middle section both groups are brought together. The upshot is that two widely distanced violin lines, related to the lonely andante melody, are dramatically scooped up by a huge chord of A flat minor, splashing harps and all, upon which the brass float a passionate yet celestial chorale. This moment of sublime euphony is almost at once confronted by an equally huge discord, pierced at the top by very loud trumpet, the discord (nine notes, not all twelve) repeated before the strings climb down for a still developing recapitulation that finally climbs back aloft in a mood of tranquil resignation. William Mann