The Hallé’s season finale – Kahchun Wong conducts Mahler’s Sixth

Humanity’s frailty and fortitude combine in Mahler’s existential Sixth Symphony, as Kahchun Wong conducts. Composed during some of the happiest times of Mahler’s life – his wife, Alma, the subject of the intensely emotive Adagietto of his Fifth Symphony, had just given birth to their second child – it seems an odd juxtaposition, then, that his Sixth Symphony is often subtitled ‘The Tragic’. While certainly filled with brooding, nihilistic underto...