The echo of the famous Perm Diaghilev Festival will reach Moscow this year. On July 2, in the Great Hall of the Conservatory, Teodor Currentzis with the international orchestra MusicAeterna will repeat the largest project of the festival.

– Is the performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony part of a larger plan?

– Yes, we decided to gather in Perm every summer with the entire MusicAeterna family – there are 125 people in it – and record one Mahler symphony. We will record a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies for Sony Classical. We have already played the Second, Third and Fifth in Perm. Next year we will do the first one in Salzburg, in Brussels too, and we will try in Moscow. We will record the First in Vienna - at the Musikverein or at the Konzerthaus: we need acoustics to get a real Viennese timpani sound. We have not yet recorded all of the symphonies we played, but this is not bad - it will be a reason to return to music. Now we will play the Sixth in Perm and Moscow, then we will record it professionally in the studio.

– Have you performed the Sixth before?

- No never! Although this is my favorite symphony, apart from “Song of the Earth”. At the age of 10 I already knew it from the notes. I lived the best period of my life when this music played in my soul. When I was 18 years old, I analyzed it for my girlfriend. But, having become a conductor and graduating from the conservatory, I decided to postpone it until later. Because I wanted to perform the symphony uncompromisingly. And this is only possible when you have your own orchestra. Although in Germany, where I am invited, and in America, orchestras know Mahler well, I need exactly the opposite. You can't get into a finished car. You need to take it apart into bolts and then put it back together.

Ural and Wilson
The Diaghilev Festival in Perm will take place from June 17 to 30. One of its events, which will open the festival, will be the premiere of Verdi's opera La Traviata staged by the classic of modern director Robert Wilson....
Read in full

Ural and Wilson

The Diaghilev Festival in Perm will take place from June 17 to 30. One of its events, which will open the festival, will be the premiere of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” staged by the classic of modern director Robert Wilson.

– Your performances are polemical in relation to other conductors. Who are you arguing with now?

– There is no performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony that I like in its entirety. I would make a collage of different interpretations. There are two recordings of the Sixth by Dimitris Mitropoulos, New York and Cologne, in the “Alma Mahler theme” you can hear pity, how hopes fall apart, then gather again. Yasha Gorenshtein does the slow part well. My favorite person is Klaus Tennstedt. I saw him live. He wore large glasses, with enlarged crying eyes looking out from the inside. He tried to make this symphony with his hands, like a child amidst a catastrophe. Although it sounded, of course, drawn out and overly romantic, there was truth in this, which, for example, is not found in Boulez, for whom everything is collected and formed. The first part is remarkable by Giuseppe Sinopoli - in general, for me he is the most important conductor of his generation, but one of those who died young. He ignores many of Mahler's instructions, but he conducted some kind of truth of his own, and he had it.

– The sixth is considered Mahler’s most tragic work, do you agree with this?

- No. Why? An ocean of love, falling in love, disappointment in love...

- But such a hopeless ending...

– I would rather call the Andante tragic, because it quotes material from “Songs about Dead Children.” And in the finale, if there is a tragedy, it is the ancient Greek one, when the “god ex machina” comes with a hammer. Mahler was afraid of the finale; he did not know how to make a finale as convincing as in the Third Symphony. In the Fourth Symphony, he put a song in place of the finale - essentially an insert number. In the Fifth Symphony, the finale, the rondo, did not work out so well. He was afraid to write the ending - like Shostakovich, so close to Mahler. He was not sure, he said: “It’s a pity that I won’t live to hear my symphony in 40 years.”

Ural and Wilson The Diaghilev Festival in Perm will take place from June 17 to 30. One of its events, which will open the festival, will be the premiere of Verdi's opera La Traviata staged by the classic of modern director Robert Wilson.... Read in full

Ural and Wilson
The Diaghilev Festival in Perm will take place from June 17 to 30. One of its events, which will open the festival, will be the premiere of Verdi's opera La Traviata staged by the classic of modern director Robert Wilson....
Read in full

Teodor Currentzis: Mahler was afraid of the ending