Mahler's Sixth Symphony is a tragic work, a work which, uniquely among Mahler's symphonies, ends in complete catastrophe. Nor is it a contradiction to assert that it is also, for much of its course, a work about growth, potential, and the joys of human affection; a work, Alma Mahler advises us, written when Mahler was in the ''full leaf and flower'' of his life. As Susanne Langer asserts in her book Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), tragedy is closely concerned with human life as ''potentiality and fulfilment'', though ''potentiality and fulfilment'' which exhausts itself in the course of the dramatic unfolding before bowing, not to some capricious incident, but to a destiny (Mahler's hammerblows perfectly enact such a concept) that is both predeterminated and implacably final.
I mention this not in order to drag a little philosophy into the columns of Gramophone but in order to give the ground and context for my assertion that Tennstedt does not wholly understand the Sixth (or if he understands it, lacks the necessary means to communicate that understanding) and that his performance is no more than an exuberant and partial caricature of it.
I say 'partial' because Tennstedt's conducting style—the strong and flexible rhythmic motioning, the rich texturing, the sense of full and humane engagement with the impassioned works he likes best to conduct—is well suited to one aspect of the Sixth. The noble and purposeful exposition, the ardently delineated 'Alma' theme, and the heart-easing slow movement, where Mahler nostalgically reflects on the natural well-sources of his happiness in a suitably old-fashioned musical idiom: all these things, matters of promise and potential, are affectionately and idiomatically attended to by Tennstedt and the LPO.
But the other side of the work—classical, tragic, organically evolving, progressively drained—seems not to feature in his thinking about the piece. In the first movement, it's only fair to reserve judgement. Not everyone will think Tennstedt to be unduly broad in the lyric climax between figs. 35 and 36 (though the mismatch of drum and basses in bar 375, like the sour trumpet note after fig. 142 of the finale, will strike some as correctable lapses in exposed passages) and I'm probably being partial myself when I say that I find Tennstedt's conducting of the pastoral interludes to be sultry and static where Karajan (DG), Haitink (Philips) and Abbado (DG) manage to be both serene and alert, suggesting relief from the encircling glooms of the valley whilst at the same time recognizing the classical spareness and imaginative fineness of Mahler's orchestration in a way which Tennstedt does not do.
It's also arguable that Tennstedt's full-blooded reading of the Scherzo is acceptable, though again some may feel that Tennstedt's sense of what is happening in the music is, at best, sketchy. The old dance rhythms which undergo such absorbing metamorphoses are indulgently handled, like an old-fashioned actor hamming The Waste Land. Karajan and Abbado, both of whom treat the music with greater restraint and clarity but with no loss of cumulative power, seem to have a surer vision of what this forward-looking, twentieth-century movement is all about.
Where Tennstedt is plainly culpable is in the finale. Lacking his rivals' ear for a spare and finely sifted orchestral sound, and more given to entrammelling subjectivism than Haitink, Karajan or Abbado, Tennstedt unfolds the finale as a multi-sectioned heroic pageant. His tempos are plausible but less closely derived from Mahler's text than Karajan's and less supportive of the symphonic argument. The hammerblows—unevenly played or recorded, the second dimmer than the first—are prepared for with an eloquence that renders their arrival grandly climactic, inadvertent acts of affirmation rather than curt and deadening gestures of negation. After the second hammerblow, the music rebuilds, in Tennstedt's hands, in a series of orchestral assualts, the rich, full-bodied brass pooping orgasmically in climax after climax.
But isn't it all very exciting? And wasn't this year's Prom performances cheered to the echo even as the final pizzicato A was falling grimly and quietly into place? Well, yes; and there's my point. For hasn't something gone badly wrong with a performance of Mahler's most classical and classically tragic symphony when it doesn't, albeit momentarily, inspire a stunned and reflective silence? When Karajan conducted the marginally less harrowing Ninth Symphony in Salzburg last year, we slunk away shattered: the applause sparse, not out of indifference or disrespect but because the musicians had given us not a staged spectacular (the familiar fate of a live Mahler performance) but a soul-chilling and soul-sustaining experience. Tennstedt's Mahler Sixth, which sounds a shade cleaner and less 'romantic' in sound on disc than on cassette, leaves me, as modern jargon has it, on an emotional high from which I find myself actively dissenting. Romantically self-indulgent, the reading denies the work its status as tragedy.'