Symphony No.6 - Mahler

The vivid colour of the National Symphony Orchestra's playing was one of the main rewards in Friday night's performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony at the National Concert Hall. This is one of the most startling and precisely calculated scores of all time. Everyone on the platform - 117 players - seemed galvanised by the challenge. The ethereal strings in the first movement's pastoral section, the intense woodwind sound in the finale and the homogeneous tone achieved by the nine horn players - these typified a commitment to do justice to this tremendous music.

Nevertheless, it was not until the last movement that the performance took off. Conductor Kasper de Roo's speed in the first movement was on the slow side for Mahler's marking, Allegro energico, ma non troppo. There was energy, but not enough forward motion or purposeful flexibility. As a companion remarked, the many joins in the first three movements were negotiated in arthritic jerks. What we lost was the drive of this piece - the caress of long melody in the slow movement, and in the first two movements, the accumulation of successive ideas into enormous sweeps of sound. Large chunks of this extraordinary music sounded dull.

Within a few minutes of starting the last movement, things changed. Kasper de Roo seemed to slacken the reins and let things run more freely. Everything seemed spontaneous, as if events were shaping themselves. Here, at last, was the intensity and scope one was looking for.