Kenneth Walton: Mahler is said to have written two Sixth Symphonies - one by Mahler the composer, the other by Mahler the conductor.

Published on Tuesday 9 March 2010 18:09

AUDIENCES at tomorrow night's Glasgow performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony will hear a very different piece from Edinburgh audiences at the Usher Hall on Friday. To paraphrase the late Eric Morecambe, both audiences will hear all the right notes, but not necessarily in the same order.

It's all part of a unique experiment by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's musical director and chief conductor, Stphane Denve, who is so intrigued by the century-old riddle surrounding the work – the discrepancy over which order the middle movements are to be played – that he has decided to put it to the practical test.

Of course, the only folk who will really get to make the comparison are Denve himself and the players of the orchestra, unless traditional RSNO audiences are planning to attend both West and East Coast versions.

So why all the fuss over the ordering of a Scherzo and an Andante? What difference does it make whether Mahler's epic spiritual journey takes the slow-fast route or the fast-slow one between its set departure and arrival points? Whichever way you look at it, this most disturbing of symphonies – referred to by Mahler himself as his "Tragic" symphony – is unequivocal in its cataclysmic objective. It signifies what the philosopher Albert Camus referred to as "the catastrophe of man". Each of the movements falls prey to the overbearing inevitability of death, even the largely idyllic Andante with its late rumblings of disorder. Minor tonalities clash head-on with major; musical order is successively shattered by eruptions of chaos. The ultimate destination is one of utter despair and emotional carnage. Either route to that end has its relevance.

It was Mahler who caused all the confusion in the first place. His original score placed the Scherzo as the second movement, and the Andante as the third. But when it came to conducting its premiere in Essen in 1904, he changed his mind and reversed the order. The outcome was a published full score that followed his initial creative instinct, but a published set of orchestral parts influenced by his practical instinct as a performer. A musical enigma was born. It's often said he effectively wrote two Sixth Symphonies: one by Mahler the composer; the other by Mahler the conductor.

With that dichotomy in mind, can a definitive resolution ever be reached? Not even Denve would be so bold as to suggest that. This is his first attempt at the Sixth – he has been working his way chronologically through all the Mahler symphonies during his tenure at the RSNO, which we now know will end in 2012 – and this two-pronged approach is his way of reaching a personal preference.

"I want to enter into the brain of Mahler himself, to feel the same doubt that he did," Denve explains. "I'm not sure yet what I will feel myself, but I'm as eager to see what the players make of it." He does admit, though, that the Scherzo-Andante solution, which Edinburgh audiences will hear, promises to be the "most musically dramatic one," while the reverse order in Glasgow will be the "most historically respectful".

But the order of the movements is not the only ambivalent feature of this enormous work. There's a question, too, over the fearsome hammer blows that signify the unstoppable force of death in the monumental 30-minute finale. The terrorising impact of these is heightened by whatever is manufactured to create them. Mostly it's a specially constructed box struck by a giant mallet (an old piece of lead piping in American conductor Ben Zander's case), and a resulting cannon-like explosion. But how many should there be?

The story goes that Mahler found the original three blows to be so overbearing – a horrifying premonition of his own fate – that he cut out the final one for fear of it all being too close to home. Conductors less personally affected tend to include it, but the practice is by no means standardised.

Denve will go with Mahler's preference and cut the final blow. It's actually a French thing, he says, referring to compatriot novelist Andr Gide's moderate-minded belief that "not too much, not too little" holds more emotive weight than sheer excess. "Others think differently," Denve admits. "I was discussing the matter with Neeme Jrvi recently, and he said 'the more the better'" – a view that will not surprise those who recall Jrvi's blistering performances and recordings of Mahler with the RSNO when he, himself, was musical director.

It's an area of Mahler research that has inevitably fallen prey to myth, including supposed assertions that the composer originally intended as many as five fatal blows to be struck. "It all sounds too good to be true," says a sceptical Denve, mindful of the danger in making the Mahler Six riddle sound as romantic as the apocryphal baggage famously associated with Mozart's Requiem.

Mahler, in a letter to the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, described the symphony as "yet another hard nut, one that our critics' feeble little teeth cannot crack". A hundred years on, only the music is around to state its persuasive case.

Denve's compare-and-contrast initiative this week is a unique embodiment of the intense debate surrounding one of the most emotive, most apocalyptic symphonies of the 20th century. No-one expects clear answers to be reached – music is too subjective for that. But just to ask the questions in so direct a manner is itself a mouth-watering prospect, and a genuine attempt to get one step nearer the truth.

&149 Stephane Denve conducts different versions of Mahler's Symphony No 6 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tomorrow, 0141-353 8000; and at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on 12 March, 0131-228 1155.