Somewhere deep within the gargantuan proportions of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony there has always resided a bundle of tensions or even contradictions — between form and content, art and life, fate and free will, the grotesque and the beautiful. Yet the sheer sincerity of the composer’s grappling with humanity’s “tragic” condition (to quote its enduring nickname) unites this work and stamps every bar with its own powerful signature. “No other work has flowed so directly from his heart as this one,” wrote Mahler’s wife, Alma.
Hearing any of the Mahler symphonies performed in Symphony Hall by the city’s great orchestra — which once offered its own directorship to Mahler himself — is an experience not to be missed. All the more so when the work on offer is the Sixth, as it is this week, and when Andris Nelsons and the orchestra give the kind of deeply committed and superbly executed performance that they did on Thursday night.
The BSO will be bringing this work on tour to Japan next month, and perhaps anticipating that tour brought an added intensity of focus to preparations for this week’s performances. Whatever the case, from the opening bars, in which Mahler lays down the heavy-treading military march motif that will appear time and again, both conductor and ensemble were fully dialed into the music’s darkly expressive world. The pacing was unhurried without dragging, and Nelsons’s characterizations throughout were sharp and dramatic without devolving to caricature. He also leaned into the soaring “Alma theme” (Mahler’s attempt to write his wife’s spirit into the symphony), allowing that motif’s glorious warmth to disperse the music’s accumulated chill.
In the first movement and at later parts of this symphony, Mahler interrupts his own proceedings to whisk the listeners somewhere very far away. The air becomes thin, the sonorities delicate. We hear cowbells — literally — meant to suggest a herd grazing in the distance. And most of all there is an atmosphere of great solitude. We are with Mahler in the mountains, utterly alone.
In Thursday’s performance, Nelsons and the orchestra set off these pastoral interludes with a subtlety that made them transporting in all the ways they should be, even if the cowbells were at times difficult to hear. Both conductor and ensemble lavished a similar care on the symphony’s gorgeous Andante (which was jarringly capped by a loud “Bravo” from the hall). Leonard Bernstein was surely right when he articulated how Mahler slow movements like that of the Sixth are so heartbreaking precisely because they are surrounded by music of such anxiety and brutality. The sudden oasis of beauty, Bernstein wrote, “floodlights these cruel pictures with the tantalizing radiance of how life could be.”
That Mahler’s own life would not be what it could have been is the devastating prophecy that seems to be issued by the Sixth. It is heralded by its ubiquitous two-chord major-minor motif, and pounded out by three notorious hammer blows that Mahler placed in the finale, by the end of which the symphony’s protagonist — the composer himself — has been, according to Alma’s account, “felled like a tree.” The years ahead would bear out the composer’s presentiments of tragedy.
Nelsons’s treatment of the vast, sprawling finale found a sweet spot between control and freedom, and brought out the vividness of Mahler’s musical phantasmagoria. The hammer blows — Nelsons did all three of them, while some conductors opt for two — were effective. Each section of the orchestra turned in focused and exceptionally strong performances with the wind and brass principals at the top of their game.
Mahler’s quiet ending for the Sixth, prepared by hushed basses handing off the final threads of music to pianissimo cellos, followed by a devastating fortissimo orchestral chord that sets up the final stroke of pizzicato, may be the most chilling of all his symphonies. It landed on Thursday night with palpable force, punctuating a night that was by far Nelsons’s and the orchestra’s strongest showing of the season.
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Andris Nelsons, conductor
At Symphony Hall, Thursday night (repeats Oct. 22)
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeremy.eichler@globe.com, or follow him @Jeremy_Eichler.