KEY POINTS:
Valery Gergiev is a familiar Arts Channel face, presenting and conducting his way through the eminently watchable All the Russias series a few years ago.
Serving up white-hot music in the city of white nights, the Russian, sometimes looking a little like George Clooney, was impeccably charismatic.
Gergiev has now turned to Mahler and, as Leonard Bernstein proved back in the 60s, these symphonies are the perfect vehicle for the charismatically inclined.
While Gergiev's Mahler cycles have not been without their critics on both sides of the Atlantic - Alex Ross tells an amusing tale of the Russian conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler's Sixth with a chopstick - the latest release from the London Symphony Orchestra's own label, featuring that symphony, augurs well for more Mahler to follow.
This Sixth is a curious port of departure - a dark, pessimistic score that Bruno Walter claimed to reek of the bitter taste of the cup of life.
Gergiev spares us nothing from the first few strides of the opening movement's baleful march; you sense, like a Mephistopheles with a baton, he enjoys its jabs and stabs of dissonance.
Yet the players and their conductor hold nothing back when all capitulates into the blazing glory of its final pages.
Gergiev's decision to place the songful Andante second rather than third is shrewd and how well he catches its innocence, down to the tremor of bow on string. Woodwind add their acerbic touches and, in all, the detail is never less than extraordinary. There is an effective truculence in the scherzo, with its dogged march-cum-dance. The brass bray and whoop, moving around en masse like great tectonic plates vying for territory, and Gergiev maintains a musical narrative as moods shift, sometimes phrase by phrase.
So what if the last movement might not reach the demonic heights that Bernstein fans cherish? This performance, caught live in London's Barbican concert hall, is a shattering world-within-a-world, with climaxes that could threaten the wellbeing of unwary speaker systems. Let us hope that more Mahlerian magnificence from Gergiev is not too far away.
* Mahler: Symphony no 6 (LSO Live LSO 061, through Ode Records)
