Sibelius and Mahler with Lisa Batiashvili

Programme

Listening to a great live performance of Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is an intensely moving experience.

Composed not long after his marriage, its 90-minute span runs the gamut from the elation of love to the darkest fear and despair. Mahler’s wife Alma (neither the most modest nor the most reliable of witnesses) said that the soaring string melody in the first movement represented her. And she saw a foreshadowing of future troubles in the final movement’s hammer blows – which the score says should be ‘brief and mighty… like the fall of an axe.’

Sibelius once hoped to become a professional violinist. He poured all his love and understanding of the instrument into his only concerto, by turns hauntingly beautiful and devilishly virtuosic. Lisa Batiashvili, acclaimed by The New York Times for her “pure, gorgeous tone and fabulous technique”, and “dazzling” (Bachtrack) young Israeli conductor Lahav Shani make a welcome return to the Philharmonia for this concert full of powerful emotions.