Article published in Manchester Evening News 2 October 2015

ON October 8 Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in Mahler’s sixth symphony.

It’s a massive work (80 minutes long) and spans joy, tragedy and every emotion in between. It’s part of the series of concerts in the Hallé series with ‘Fate’ as their connecting theme.

It will be the first time Sir Mark has conducted the work with the Hallé, though he’s done it elsewhere (including a performance with the young musicians of Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester recently).

“I really admire it for its idea of a symphonic journey,” he told me. “It’s so different from his fifth symphony, which is a progress from darkness to light.

“It’s disturbing and agitated and it has high drama – but I treasure the moments when he uses his vast orchestra to create delicate, but entirely different passages.

“We will have four harps and three celestas: when they are heard with everyone else playing very quietly there’s a colour there that no other Romantic composer achieved.”

He knows very well that the symphony poses its problems. One is the order in which to play the inner movements. Mahler originally wrote his scherzo (in faster tempo) as the second movement, but in practice performed it third, after the slow movement.

“There’s no question that you can do it either way,” says Sir Mark, “but to me, after the optimism of the end of the first movement, and the ecstasy and romance of the slow movement, to return to this breathless, pounding music, which then sinks and collapses is a wonderful bridge to the drama of the fourth movement.

Another question surrounds the fatalistic hammer blows of the last movement – each written at a point of climax, and thought to represent for the composer crushing blows in his life – the end of his marriage, the collapse of his health and the death of his daughter. “Mahler later took the third one out because he couldn’t bear to hear it, but the music that follows it is so much an elegy, an expression of mourning, that it doesn’t make sense without it.”

For the hammer, which the score says should sound like an axe felling a tree, the Hallé will use a specially made box first used by their colleagues in Liverpool. “It will be raised up so everyone can see it … that’s the drama of the piece,” says Sir Mark.