Mahler's Sixth 'a journey through stages of life'

The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra has given us some memorable Mahler over the past few years and, for a while, it seemed that the then-music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya was working his way, symphony by symphony, towards a complete Mahler cycle.

This Thursday, current music director Eckehard Stier puts the APO players back on the Mahlerian highway with the orchestra's first performance of the great Sixth Symphony, the so-called "Tragic," described by the composer's widow as "the most completely personal of all his works, and a prophetic one too."

For Stier, Thursday's performance is his big target for the year. "It's so different from all the other Mahler Symphonies," he explains. "The First, the Fifth, the Ninth - all these have a clear answer. It's in the music. But it's not so easy to follow a clear line through the 80 minutes of the Sixth."

Stier sees it as a "journey through the different stages of life. The first movement is so positive, a real march." The conductor uses the image of a kind grandfather sitting in a chair to pin down the more folksy charms of the Scherzo but the following Andante is "like music from heaven with angels singing; a miracle, a yearning for eternity ... It's full of love, but sometimes it's full of pain," he shrugs.

The 30-minute Finale, hailed by the great German conductor Bruno Walter as a "night of the soul," comes with some thunderous hammer-on-box moments - "like the stroke of an axe" was Mahler's description. Auckland will be hearing them three times rather than the two stipulated in the score.

"I look to Lenny," says Stier, acknowledging that the charismatic Bernstein is one of the gods when it comes to Mahler interpretation. "There's a definite place in the score for it to be played a third time and, as there were three times in his life when Mahler was completely unhappy, we did that."

As for the making of the fateful sounds, a hammer was specially imported from Melbourne while a custom-built box has had to be rebuilt "because it wasn't noisy enough."

It is not difficult to imagine that much of Mahler's appeal for the highly theatrical Bernstein was the Austrian's taste for lurching from an almost kitschy folksiness to some of the most profound music ever written.

"It's the serious Mahler that I love but this kitsch side is important. It makes you smile, relax and recover. For the orchestra and conductor this kitsch side is often quite difficult to get together as there is such a lot of tempo changing."

In his first year as the APO's music director, Stier is making his presence felt. When he returns to Europe early next month he will have spent two months with us and is "beginning to understand what Auckland people are moved by and how they are thinking."

There have been frustrations trying unsuccessfully to secure the APO a stadium gig for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. "It must be possible in such a great city," Stier protests. "It's necessary because we have so much art here."

Stier was also behind the orchestra's recent Open Day, which coaxed hundreds to come into town on one of the rainiest days of the year and he is still buzzing after last month's Connecting with Music concert in which the APO performed Falla and Rodrigo to a Town Hall of rapt school students.

"I learned a lot about these kids, and they're quite different to kids in Germany," Stier reflects. "The mood of the audience was really full of concentration, quiet, calm, fantastic. Classical music is more than entertainment. It's good for the heart, good for the soul, and it's good to have feelings."

PERFORMANCE

* What: Mahler Symphony No6, with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday 8pm