When I finally walked out of Avery Fisher Hall, my hands were shaking. It wasn’t the cold, I knew, nor the sheer grandiose of the Lincoln Center Plaza. Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony still rang out around me, and the woodwind passages played on constant loop inside my head. The concert program I saw, featuring the New York Philharmonic, was only performed for three days, between September 29 and October 1, 2010. But the music, I knew, would haunt me for much longer.
A violinist myself, I have performed many of Mahler’s orchestral works, but I was surprised to find out that I had never heard his sixth symphony. It began in a near-militaristic march, which provided little foreshadowing for Mahler’s flowing, emotional approach to the rest of the work. [click to continue….]
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