“My Sixth will propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” That was Gustav Mahler writing in 1904 to future biographer Richard Specht. His Sixth Symphony, the so-called “Tragic,” has indeed been his toughest nut to crack. America didn’t hear it until 1947, when Dmitri Mitropoulos led the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. The BSO didn’t play it till 1964, nearly 60 years after the 1906 Essen premiere. Since then, Boston has been making up for lost time. The BSO has given some 60 performances, 16 of them under outgoing music director Andris Nelsons. The symphony has been a favorite with Benjamin Zander, who did it most recently with the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in 2017 and 2025; Zander has also issued four different recordings. got their turn. They delivered an inspired and inspiring performance.
Kendall Square Orchestra came into being in 2018, imagined as an orchestra built by and for the region’s science and technology community. Under Music Director Kondakçi, K2O has grown into an ensemble of 96 members representing more than 40 local companies and institutions. Friday’s concert was the third in an ambitious Sanders Theater season that has already given us Brahms’s Double Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. May will bring the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.
Some of Mahler’s riddles involve performance issues. At the premiere, he was expecting to perform the Scherzo as the second movement and the Andante moderato as the third, but at the end of rehearsals, he decided to switch the movement order to Andante-Scherzo. Owing to confusion created by the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft’s 1963 Critical Edition, however, most performances of the Sixth since then have had the Scherzo preceding the Andante. There’s no evidence Mahler changed his mind, and more and more conductors are now doing it his way, Andante then Scherzo. That, I think, is the right order, and it’s the one Kondakçi adopted Friday. As far as I know, he’s only the third conductor to do Andante-Scherzo in Boston, following Zander with the BPO in the 1980s (Ben has since switched back to Scherzo-Andante) and James Levine with the BSO in 2008.
A second issue is the number of hammer blows in the Finale. The score Mahler brought with him to Essen had three. Alma described them as the three blows of fate that fell the symphony’s hero. Did Mahler see them as such? We don’t know. In any event, he deleted the third one, possibly at Essen, possibly during the summer of 1906, when he was revising the symphony. Some conductors—Nelsons and Zander among them—restore the third hammer blow, arguing that Mahler removed it only because he was superstitious. The first two serve a similar function, as roadblocks in the development. The third, coming after the hero (if there ever was one) has fallen, seems redundant. Kondakçi gave us just the two.
I would have been delighted to see K2O’s violins deployed antiphonally, but also very surprised. That’s the arrangement composers of Mahler’s day wrote for, but in the 20th century, conductors began to seat first and second violins to their left. Coordination with split violins can be challenging, and coordinating the 112 musicians on stage Friday was enough of a challenge. Kondakçi placed the two harps on his extreme left, along with the celesta, then the nine French horns. The brass were arrayed along the back, the percussion positioned in the back right corner. The cowbells wound up in the far right corner of the mezzanine; that seemed to me an odd idea when I passed them on my way to the balcony, but it worked.
We actually have a good idea of how the Sixth should go, because Mahler left us timings: 23 minutes for the opening Allegro energico, 15 for the Andante, 12 for the Scherzo, and 31 for the Finale. By my rough estimate, Kondakçi took 23, 13, 13, and 30. The Allegro energico, marked “ma non troppo,” went at a sensible fast walk. The Andante didn’t seem at all too quick. Conductors tend to turn it into an Adagio, but even at 60 beats per minute, which is a very slow Andante, the movement times out to about 13:30.
More important than overall timings was this conductor’s attention to Mahler’s internal markings, like the ritardando at the end of the Allegro energico’s exposition, and the way the ensuing E-flat pastoral idyll has to become “gradually somewhat more held back,” and then the sudden return to the movement’s original tempo. The Altväterisch (“old-fashioned”) second subject of the Scherzo, with its alternating bars of 4/8, 3/8, and 3/4, really was “markedly slower” as well as “gracious,” and the spooky third subject “somewhat slower still.” The introductory section of the Finale, at 113 bars and over five minutes, can sag; this one went close to the indicated Allegro moderato. Mahler didn’t mark any major tempo changes for the Andante, but I always think the troubled second subject should go faster, and here it did. Kondakçi phrased thoughtfully, relaxing in transitional passages and giving each movement shape.
The Sixth is high voltage; no other Mahler symphony affords the performers so little time to relax. K2O coped as well as one could expect. There was the occasional insecure or tentative moment; there was some congestion. I can’t think of another symphony where the French horns are so exposed, and Friday’s heroic gang of nine did suffer the odd bobble. The concertmaster’s brief solo in the Andante didn’t register, and neither did the cowbells at the movement’s climax.
For the most part, though, Kondakçi let us hear everything Mahler intended, which is no small feat. At the start of the Allegro energico, he made room for the militant snare drum (Lauren Girouard) and the protesting solo trumpet (CJ Waldrop), and you had no trouble discerning the crucial theme that Mahler borrowed from Liszt’s First Piano Concerto when it appeared in the trumpets, the trombones, and finally the French horns. Mahler’s ubiquitous French horn counterpoint was unusually salient. Apart from the climax of the Andante, the cowbells (Greg Savino) had the right sound and random energy. The celesta (Sayuri Miyamoto) sparkled in the pastoral idyll of the Allegro energico, and again in the Andante. The xylophone (Harry Zhang) danced like a skeleton in the Allegro energico’s development and in the Scherzo. The Scherzo eased out with a poignant succession of clarinet (Josh Redman), flute (Ting-Yu Yeh), oboe (Joel Bard), E-flat clarinet (Gaston Gosselin), bass clarinet (Diego Bacigalupe), and contrabassoon (Doug Wilkins). In the Finale, the rute (Halle Hayoung Song)—a bundle of sticks beaten against a drum—stood out the way Mahler meant it to.
Those were more fine solos. English horn (Tyler Rand) opening the second subject of the Andante, and then French horn (William Prince) when the first subject returned. Tuba (Jack Branham) at the outset of the Finale; solo violin (Yoonhee Lee) at the start of the recapitulation. And, of course, the hammer blows. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman deliver them, but they were no problem for Girouard; it almost seemed a shame not to hear the third one. Kondakçi instead drew attention to the climax at bar 773, when the music descended to what it expected would be an A-major chord only to find a naked A waiting. Hope evaporated at that point, and at bar 783, where the third hammer blow originally came, there was resignation, almost acceptance. The quartet of trombones that ushered the symphony out bespoke dignity, even majesty. This Sixth wasn’t so much tragic as cathartic.
Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.
Great to read about this performance by the Kendall Square Orchestra performance of Mahler 6. Mahler 6 is a challenge for any orchestra at any level, let alone a part-time non-professional orchestra. As someone with a science degree, it’s especially heartening to read of how science, engineering, and medical folks unite to bring orchestral music to life.
Now, it’s necessary to address and rebut the newest round of gaslighting from the Andante:Scherzo camp in this review of Mahler 6. The publication of the 1963 edition of Mahler 6, which utilized the original order of the movements (Scherzo:Andante), did not cause “confusion”. If anything, the resulting burst of performances of Mahler 6 in subsequent decades proves that this edition provided clarity, as Mahler 6 attained more and more live performances with the advent of that edition. The true ‘confusion’ came with the 2010 edition, with Reinhold Kubik’s statement 6 years earlier that “the official position of the institution I represent is that the correct order of the middle movements of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is Andante-Scherzo”. This statement completely ignored the historical fact of Scherzo:Andante as the original order.
Furthemore, to say that the revised order of Andante:Scherzo is “his way” (i.e. Mahler’s way) is to ignore the historical fact of the original order of Scherzo:Andante, which was also “his way”, at an earlier phase. In other words, at different times, both ways were “his way”. Likewise, to state that “There’s no evidence Mahler changed his mind” is incorrect at the outset, because he switched the original order of the inner movements in the 1904 rehearsals in Essen, from the original order that had remained that way for two years prior. This act in Essen is indeed evidence that Mahler “changed his mind”, during the process of work on this symphony prior to the world premiere of the complete work.
Deep down, related to all of this, the Andante:Scherzo camp has always avoided asking this fundamental question:
Which order of the inner movement works best in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 as a visceral listening experience, from the beginning to the end of the symphony?
In my own very minor opinion (which I’m at least willing to admit), the answer is simple and clear: Scherzo:Andante, the original inner movement order, works better – **infinitely better**. Here’s why.
The similarity of the openings of first movement and the scherzo is intentional. They thus form an interconnected pair of movements, of about 30-33 minutes duration. Balancing that span of music is the fourth movement, itself about 30-33 minutes long, which can be seen as consisting of two parts:
(a) the long introduction which reintroduces the characteristic descending major-to-minor motif from the first movement, which then leads to:
(b) the remainder of the finale that culminates in that most bleak and shattering of symphonic endings.
Thus, with the original order of the inner movements as Scherzo:Andante, the Andante, the movement of maximum peace and repose in the symphony (however uneasy some of the undercurrents are), falls exactly in the middle of the work. Thus, in its original place, the Andante balances those two massive 33-or-so minute spans of music perfectly.
Furthermore, the opening of the fourth movement, right after the Andante, subtly breaks the calm spell weaved by the Andante, and eases the transition into the cumulative emotional cataclysm of the rest of the Finale. In this context, to put the Scherzo third after the Andante wrecks the calm of the Andante too soon, 12 minutes too early. As well, putting the Scherzo just before the Finale gives a far more emotionally redundant pairing of movements compared to the original order, where that order becomes 45 minutes of too much of the same “Sturm und Drang”. The Andante:Scherzo camp plays on the extremely superficial aspect of the openings of the first movement and the scherzo sounding very like each other, which ignores the fact that Mahler exactly intended that at the outset. Having the Andante third also is far better for the musicians in terms of both emotional and physical status, as well as the audience, IMVHO. The Andante as the third movement again balances perfectly the surrounding 30-33 minutes blocks of “Strum und Drang”, as opposed to the revised order which would essentially have:
A. 17 minutes of “Sturm und Drang”
B. 14 minutes of calm
C. 47 minutes of “Sturm und Drang”
In that sense, the revised order is a very lopsided balance. As well, in the revised order of Andante:Scherzo, the opening of the finale makes that “breaking of the spell” redundant, after the Scherzo has already shattered the calm of the Andante when placed third. The “breaking of the spell” that the Andante previously weaved is far subtler with the Andante placed third.
The Andante:Scherzo camp again never ask the question of which order actually works better in real life and real listening, as well as real playing. Instead, as evidenced in the video interview between Peter Korfmacher, Reinhold Kubik, and Riccardo Chailly in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra video set of the Mahler symphonies, Kubik and his camp essentially resorted to Alma-bashing, after the citation of the 1919 telegram communications between Willem Mengelberg and Alma Mahler where Alma M. had conveyed to Mengelberg ‘Erst Scherzo dann Andante’ in advance of the 1920 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam. Kubik basically let the mask drop by dismissing Alma as a lying drunk, with saying in that interview (in translation) “Well, that was a mistake”, as his “evidence” of why no one should trust Alma on Mahler 6, without any discussion of musical logic. His not-so-subtle dissing of Alma is a totally invalid argument for the revised order, because Alma’s character flaws have absolutely nothing to do with Mahler 6 as an independent artistic creation. (She helped copy the score of Mahler 6, by the way.) Everything from Reinhold Kubik and his crew on Mahler 6 reeks of Alma-bashing, not musical argument.
Ultimately, regarding Mahler 6, it is fine that both options are available. Both options have historical evidence to support each choice. Thus, both options are “correct”, contrary to Kubik and his imposed bias in the revised edition. Conductors are free, as they should be, to choose whichever order that she/he feels serves the music best. It’s fine that Kristo Kondakçi went with the revised order, as the chance to hear a great orchestral work like Mahler 6 live is always welcome. It’s the far weaker and less effective order musically, as I’ve enunciated above. But again, it’s better to have a good live Mahler 6 with either order of the inner movements than there to be no live Mahler 6 at all.
For Mr. Kondakçi, my guess is that you’ve seen this review. Perhaps you won’t see this comment (the only one so far) as a follow-up. Either way, my long-distance congratulations to you and the Kendall Square Orchestra for giving this performance. I hope that you have future opportunities to conduct Mahler 6, whether with the Kendall Square Orchestra or elsewhere. If you do get such future chances, a modest request for you: please conduct Mahler 6 with the original order of the inner movements. You may be quite surprised at how well the original order works. I wish you a future Mahler 6 conducting opportunity and success with it.
Comment by Geo. — April 5, 2026 at 2:28 pm