Exploring late Mahler …

… Simon Rattle’s high-def 3-D Mahler festival with the London Symphony was a landmark in the New York season.

But there is much else to consider in the completed 10th. Is this Mahler’s most autobiographical symphony? All of his works have confessional qualities, though not rendered as graphically as the 10th symphony’s evocation of a New York City funeral procession with its stark, somber drum-pounding. The hammer blows in the Symphony No. 6 are clearly an antecedent, but those are abstracted to suggest a speculative look at the ruthlessness of fate. In the 10th, the funeral train for a fallen policeman that inspired Mahler was literally right outside his New York window, and it actually sounds that way in the symphony – a case of his outer life giving greater form and substance to his inner life. Elsewhere in the first and fifth movements are the famous piled-high dissonances – the orchestral scream, in other words – that also speak to the disintegration of Mahler’s outer world: His professional life in New York had grown extremely bumpy, his wife Alma was discovered to be having an affair with a younger man, and the heart condition that was to kill him (with the irregular heartbeats written into the 9th symphony) was growing worse.