NOSPR / Domingo Hindoyan - NOSPR

„There is only one Sixth – despite the existence of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony” – Alban Berg ruled out in his letter to Anton Webern written in 1908, just two years after the world first performance of The Tragic Symphony in Saalbau, Essen. Mahler’s work has been a mystery and a puzzle ever since: it was written, when everything in the composer’s life was going on as if in a dream, and over ten years before the outbreak of the Great War which was to claim millions of lives, and to wipe off the surface of our planet the youngest, the most talented, most needed and loved ones. Wilhelm Furtwängler – the famous conductor - called it „the first manifestation of total nihilism in history of music”. Leonard Bernstein went even further and declared The Sixth to be a prophecy of the mankind’s doom. The hammer striking three times in the final of the symphony, according to Mahler’s own suggestion “like a sound of a falling ax”, will seal today’s concert conducted by Domingo Hindoyan, who polished his skills, among others, under Bernard Haitink, - one of the most spirited interpreters of the Viennese master of symphonic music.