You can call it the best program you’ve never heard in your life. You can call it the almost revelatory program that almost happened- what you can’t call it is the program for the final concert of the Harlech Orchestral Summer School, which I’m now preparing for.

Harlech is an intense week long program that covers an immense amount of substantial repertoire. Some is simply workshopped and read, while a few pieces are selected for extra rehearsal and the final performance. This year it has been a given that Mahler 5 is going to be on that program- in this year, how could it not be? But what to pair it with?

As it turns out, part of the equation includes a premiere of a new work by Duncan Stubbs written for the winds of the academy called “Harlech Variants.” Given the massive scale of the Mahler and the presence of the Stubbs, it would seem that all that is needed is a relatively slight work to open the program.

Of this year’s repertoire, the obvious choice is Ravel’s La Valse, although one would never call it slight! The parallels with the Mahler are obvious and fascinating- the Scherzo of the Mahler seems an obvious model for the Ravel. Both use dance, notably (but not exclusively) the Viennese waltz, to delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche.

However, as we get closer to the beginning of the festival, there is another work in the repertoire I’ve longed to program alongside the Mahler. I even went so far as to suggest to my colleagues that we ought to ditch the Ravel and do it instead- in spite of the fact that it would make for a ridiculously long program and a very exhausting week of rehearsals. My associates wisely talked me down from that particular ledge.

The piece, of course, is Shostakovich’s 6^th Symphony. Why? Surely the Ravel is the obvious and perfect pairing? Is this just a case of Ken the Shostakovich nut looking for any possible chance to perform a Shostakovich symphony?

Well, I can’t rule that out, but there was more to it than that. First, the Ravel is the obvious pairing. The Shostakovich is just the more interesting pairing because it seems that putting these two great but highly unorthodox works on the same program could be much more illuminating, and could help us to hear both works with clearer ears.

Shostakovich 6 is one of those pieces that is often described as “enigmatic.” It is in 3 movements- one very long slow movement followed by two very short fast movements. It has always had its advocates (Lenny loved it and conducted it brilliantly), but many people can’t get past the fact that it doesn’t seem to do what symphonies after Beethoven are supposed to do, which is to reconcile and resolve large-scale tensions.

The Largo completely overshadows the other two movements, obviously in terms of scale, but also in terms of emotional impact. On the other hand, surely a genius like Shostakovich knew which rules he was breaking and why. Surely Beethoven taught us  that what a symphony ought to do with a movement like the Largo is to balance it with a Finale of equal scale and weight? That’s what his 5^th and 9^th symphonies do so well, and it’s something Mahler mastered in his 2^nd Symphony.

In fact, Mahler 2 might be the ultimate symphonic example of a vast, tragic opening movement (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6) which is followed by some shorter intermezzo-like movements (again like the Shostakovich), which culminates and a vaster and more dramatic triumphant Finale in which all the darkness and tension of the first movement is transcended and resolved (something conspicuously missing in the Shostakovich).

If Mahler 2 is the grandest and most perfect example of that approach to symphonic form, it’s certainly not the only example. Bruckner deals with it in his 5^th, 8^th and 9^th Symphonies (we can see from the fragments where he was going with the Finale of his 9^th). And, even if the 2^nd is the most powerful and explicit example of a cathartic Finale in his music, Mahler’s 1^st 4 symphonies all treat the Finale in a similar way- as a summing up and culmination of all that precedes them.

However, in the 5^th Symphony, Mahler for the first time goes in a different and more ambivalent direction. The 5^th is written in 5 movements, which are grouped into 3 parts. The 1^st part of the symphony is unmistakably where the center of gravity of the entire work is located- two movements of unprecedented darkness, intensity and ferocity. Part I of Mahler 5 ends in as black an abyss as anything in the repertoire I can think of (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6). Dark as the Funeral March is which opens the 2^nd Symphony, there still seems to be room for the drama to continue from that point. The ending of Part I of Mahler 5 is so black and nihilistic that it seems impossible that anything could follow which would be able to balance or transcend that darkness.

Mahler follows this in Part II with an ambivalent Scherzo which you can read about here. Like the Ravel, it is in many ways a dance of death, or at the very least a dance which expresses a certain affection for oblivion. Again, Part II of the Shostakovich is similar- it is also a Scherzo, but the mood is hardly carefree.

Part III of the Mahler promises a return to life. It is now well known that in many respects, the famous Adagietto is a love song, but it is also filled with references to Mahler’s own Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children. Yes, it has moments of stunning tenderness and exquisite longing, but it, never mind what today’s politically correct writers tell you, includes passages of searing anguish and deep, deep pain.

In Mahler 2, the last grand and dramatic Finale is preceded like a structural upbeat by the song Urlicht. Like the Adagietto, it is intimate and tender music in which hope seems to begin to awaken, if not assert itself. However, where the Finale of the 2^nd begins with a savagely dramatic outburst (obviously related to the opening of the Finale of Beethoven 9), the Finale of Mahler 5 begins with a joke. Mahler quotes one of his own songs (Lob des hohen Verstandes, or “In Praise of Lofty Intelligence”) about a singing competition between a cuckoo and a nightingale judged by an ass. It hardly promises a Finale in which the tragedy of  Part I can be overcome, and it turns out to be.

The Finale of Mahler 5 is humorous, virtuosic and passionate. The humor is sometimes warm and bright, other times black and sardonic. It makes extensive reference to the music of the Adagietto, now played in a genuinely carefree, breezy style, perhaps as if to say love is as much a game as anything else. There is only one reference to Part I, but what a reference it is- just before the end, he brings back the great chorale of the 2^nd Movement. This overpowering peroration had collapsed into abject crisis the first time it was heard, but here, it shines out in triumphant confidence. If the symphony ended here, he might just have pulled of the kind of transcendent ending we’d been hoping for all along, and what a feat that would have been!

But Mahler chooses not to do so. Instead, the piece continues just long enough to undermine the Chorale. Instead of ending in catharsis, the piece ends in laughter – perhaps, like love, triumph is also all just a game, or perhaps he is saying that the culmination of the chorale is the ending to yesterday’s story- life goes on! The piece ends with a torrent of whole tone scales- the most ambivalent of musical structures. Is it light or dark humor? Is there an edge of madness in that laughter? Those whole tone scales seem to signal we can’t be sure Do we all live happily after? Are all life’s problems solved? I don’t think so, but life goes on, and in Mahler’s world the primal force of life is extraordinarily powerful.

Likewise, the 3^rd Mvt of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t try to fix what the Largo has broken. Like Mahler’s Finale, the primary emotion is humor, both dark and light. Much as I love, and much as the world needs the Finale of Mahler 2, the Finale of Maher 5 is truer to life, hard as that is to accept. My sense is that Shostakovich 6 is also a pretty profoundly true-to-life work. Perhaps he is saying that suffer as you will (remember the Largo), don’t expect the heavens to open and for God to give you all the answers. Life goes on, in all its hilarity and insanity.

Side by side, the Shostakovich looks a little less of an enigmatic failure and much more a triumph of ironic realism, and the Mahler looks less Beethovenian and more modern.

Of course, it’s possible there is an even darker truth in the Shostakovich- we know he advertised that his original intention was to make the work a portrait of Lenin, complete with choral Finale. Maybe the work was meant to look more like Mahler 2, and the 2^nd and 3^rd movements were kindred intermezzi to the 2^nd and 3^rd mvts of Mahler 2?

However, in 1939, Russia was still waiting for the happy ending to the Lenin drama. Perhaps the deafening silence that follows the 3^rd mvt of the 6^th is the point. Shostakovich didn’t write a Finale because life hadn’t given him one to depict?

It sounds good, but I’m not convinced. The Largo seems to introverted and personal to have anything to do with politics and history- if it’s about anything other than despair, it is about music. More on that to come, I hope.

It has always bothered commentators that the ending of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t feel like an ending worthy of its beginning. Isn’t that obviously his point? Of course the piece is unfinished- he doesn’t want you to walk away from the symphony ready go out for a drink. He wants us to be thinking about what the piece means, to be struggling to make sense of its pain and contradictions. The work of the listener is just beginning when this piece ends.