Mahler's career as a composer ends with a paradox. The 10th Symphony is for many his greatest, yet he left it unfinished and we can only approach it through one of several posthumous performing editions. Its composition coincided with a crisis in his marriage, during which Mahler consulted Freud. The symphony is a remorseless act of self-analysis, and it ends in new psychological territory as he resolves its tensions into a serenity that lies beyond neurotic conflict.
Endings and beginnings were much in the air during Gianandrea Noseda's performance with the BBC Philharmonic. The closing concert of the Manchester Mahler cycle, it was also Noseda's first after the news that his next season will be his last as chief conductor.
Using Deryck Cooke's edition, he showed an intensity of feeling not seen in previous performances. The gradations of pressure in the opening adagio were superbly done. We were less conscious of the faults of proportion in the awkwardly unrevised scherzo than on previous occasions. The finale, troubling and beautiful, was followed by a long silence before the applause began.
Its companion piece was Anthony Payne's The Period of Cosmographie, inspired by a visit to a Reykjavik science museum, where Payne listened to a recording of subterranean rumblings from a seismograph. The score is held together by a cell-like, oscillating phrase that suggests the grinding of tectonic plates, between which the rest of the music spills like lava. The closing section drifts like that infamous ash cloud before sinking to silence. It was remarkable.
