Petrenko’s First Mahler in Berlin is the Sixth

Today I decided to return to the Digital Concert Hall for a second opportunity to observe Kirill Petrenko during his first season as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. I chose to view his performance on this past January 25, which turned out to be the first time he brought an interpretation of Gustav Mahler to Berlin Philharmonic programming. His choice was a daring one: the four-movement sixth symphony in A minor.

Many view this as Mahler’s darkest composition; and some even have given it the name “Tragische” (tragic). It is best known for the “hammer blows of fate,” which are introduced in the “program” of the final movement. According to his wife Alma, this involved a narrative of three misfortunes that befall a fictitious protagonist, “the third of which fells him like a tree.” Mahler never specified how those blows would sound, but they usually involve the dull thud of a very large wooden hammer (requiring both arms to wield) falling on the surface of a resonating box. After Mahler experienced two misfortunes of his own, the death of his eldest daughter and the diagnosis of his heart condition, he removed the third hammer blow from the score, thinking that it would presage his own death.

In that same context Mahler introduced a “fate” motif early in the first movement of his symphony:

The core of this motif involves an A major triad dropping its inner pitch into the minor mode while the timpani pounds out a slightly eccentric rhythm. The timpani rhythm recurs throughout the symphony. However, in the final measures it resounds against a chord that begins in A minor and stays there as the music’s “final gasp.”

There is also an ambiguity in the symphony’s journey from first to last movement. There are two different publications with different orderings for the second and third movements. I first came to know this symphony through the recording that Georg Solti made with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on which the second movement is the intensely sardonic Scherzo followed by the Andante moderato, which serves as the calm before the storm of the final movement. This is also the order taken in the performances I have listened to with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Simon Rattle, on the other hand, has the Andante moderato precede the Scherzo in his recordings with both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. Petrenko chose to go with Rattle’s ordering.

What is most important about last January’s video document of Petrenko’s conducting is that he judiciously kept all intimations of melodrama in check in favor of making sure that the abundant wealth of detail on the score pages was given a clear account. This amounts to recognizing how both themes and their constituent phrases emerge in a wide diversity of contexts. There are any number of ways in which those elements might be interpreted as Mahler experimenting with Richard Wagner’s leitmotif concept. Petrenko did not try to forge a narrative around such interpretation, preferring to let each individual listener take or leave any narrative implications on his/her own terms.

More important was just making sure that all of the constituent nuts and bolts would register with any attentive listener. My own opinion is that Petrenko succeeded impressively, particularly when one was aware of some nut or bolt that was not given visual reinforcement from the camera work. As a result, any intimation of a dramatic undercurrent was left to speak for itself. The listener could then decide whether the entire symphony amounted to some prolonged “tragic” expression or was just a fascinating interplay of thematic materials, many of which dwelled in the minor mode. In the context of my own history of listening to this symphony, I found that Petrenko’s approach made for a very satisfying experience.