New Zealand Mahler: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra / Gemma New (conductor). Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, New Zealand, 5.9.2025. (PM)
Mahler – Symphony No.6 in A minor
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s fruitful five-season partnership with its current Music Director, Gemma New, will change in 2027 when New will hand over the reins of Principal Conductor to German-born Anton de Ridder, who made his debut with the NZSO in 2023. New will continue her association with the orchestra as Artistic Partner, while she undertakes a series of prestigious guest engagements with orchestras around the world (amongst these, incidentally, were to have been a number of engagements she had originally scheduled with the Israel Philharmonic and from which she has now withdrawn). More happily, her remaining 2025 NZSO concerts include a mouth-watering Berlioz Les Nuits d’été with soprano Joyce di Donato in November.
Her most recent concert with the orchestra was the mighty Mahler Sixth Symphony – a composer I had already come to associate with New, having previously (March 2023) heard her radiant performance of the Third Symphony with the orchestra, a glowing, almost alchemic realisation of Mahler’s great paean to Nature. How would she fare, then, with this very different work described (famously by the Wilhelm Furtwangler, who never conducted it) as ‘the first nihilistic work in the history of music’?
The Sixth is a work which, perhaps more than any other Mahler symphony, has invited plenty of discussion and disagreement over both interpretative and structural issues. One is the ‘tempo giusto’ for the first movement’s Allegro energico, ma non troppo. Heftig, aber markig, with conductors mostly tending towards the allegro energico rather than the ma non troppo – the additional ‘Heftig, aber markig’ (intense but powerful) might be achieved at any tempo – save for a few interpreters intent upon adding weight to the ‘power’.
New’s performance unequivocally stressed the ‘allegro energico’ aspect right at the work’s beginning and throughout most of the first two movements. But her NZSO players also performed wondrous chameleon-like transformations with the first-movement trajectories of both the passionate ‘Alma’ theme (given a surging fluidity), and the sudden appearance of the otherworldly ‘alpine-heights’ dream-music with its vertiginous celeste figurations and hauntingly atmospheric ‘cowbell’ echoes.
She also controlled the numerous tempo changes of the second movement with total mastery, the players again completely in accord with the music’s often quixotic fluctuations between force and delicacy.
A more serious controversy with this symphony has concerned the order of the two middle movements, originally conceived by the composer as being Scherzo, followed by Andante – but Mahler reversed this order before conducting the first performance and never altered his preference. After his death his widow, Alma, maintained that the correct order was the ‘original’ (pre-first performance) Scherzo-first one, which, despite the composer’s preference, was then reinforced by the publication of the score in the mid-1950s ‘Critical Edition’. Scholars have argued ever since as to which order should be followed, with the result that interpreters on record over the years are more or less divided over which to follow.
I am admitting my own Scherzo-first bias in this matter by reporting with some pleasure that New chose to perform the composer’s original Scherzo-then-Andante arrangement – perhaps in line with an argument that has arisen concerning the key signatures of the respective movements, and where the A minor Scherzo, as opposed to the E♭ major Andante, should best ‘fit in’.
All controversy apart, following the ups and downs of the two opening A minor movements came this wonderful Andante, one of the loveliest, most heart-rending melodies in symphonic literature. Here it was presented by New and her players with exquisite sounding variations of intensity, firstly by the strings with help from oboe and flute, then moving to the cor anglais, who in turn passed the pulsating tenderness of the line to the clarinet and afterwards to a solo horn. Each of the timbral variations of this sequence had its moment of aching loveliness, as did those which followed, the music building through wave after wave of emotion towards a sudden depiction of those mountain vistas the composer so adored – the horns opening the spaces for the winds and the cowbells to enchant our sensibilities, a rapturous moment that was suddenly swept aside by passionately urgent strings! Like a sudden realisation that this moment of rapture was not to last, its resonant energies were brought into play to counter the despair at the eventual end of things as the music regretfully and tenderly subsided. Achingly beautiful flute tones bade a farewell to these all-too-transient visions!
Just as gripping was New’s control at the finale’s opening (the symphony’s longest movement), a sound scenario dramatically cracked and broke apart to reveal a kind of void, resonantly replete with warnings for the faint-hearted wishing to pass through its perils – with a baleful tuba, portentous harp-notes, and agitated strings all suggesting imminent catastrophe. Piercing trumpet calls, louring brass, agitated winds and heel-snapping percussion hustled the music’s trajectories inexorably towards a series of cataclysmic confrontations with hammer-blows of fate, devised by the composer in the form of an enormous mallet-type instrument crashed onto a wooden plate (here spectacularly highlighted by a spotlit percussionist and his gigantic instrument).
Mahler had originally intended three hammer-blows but deleted the third one (reinstated in some performances!) in favour of an exhausted-sounding orchestral climax which, after imploding, gradually sank into the most desolate of brass-led codas. There was no choice but to await one’s fate – here, a veritable sword of Damocles descending to shattering effect and bringing about the symphony’s conclusion.
All of this proclaimed a confident and capable interpreter’s ability to make an orchestra give of its best and further enhance its ever-growing Mahler credentials – a performance to place alongside others for the ages.
Peter Mechen