Defiance

Bernard Haitink’s most recent appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic have inclined towards works associated with the final years of a composer’s life: Bruckner’s Ninth, Schubert’s unfinished B minor symphony and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde have all received grandly scaled, nobly elegiac performances under his guidance. For his most recent appearance, he turned his attention to perhaps the greatest valedictory symphony of all, Mahler’s Ninth. Mahler had been obsessed with death – the death of children, the death that precedes resurrection, the death that comes with the hammer blows of fate – throughout his career, but by the end of the twentieth century’s first decade he may have sensed it drawing closer. His premonitions turned out to be correct: he died only a year after completing the Ninth, leaving the sketches for a tenth…