Mahler’s Sixth Symphony—90-odd minutes of descent, disintegration, mad marching—is not a festive piece. The cameo-studded, light-hearted party-concerts for Simon Rattle’s departure as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic had come and gone, and now it was time for serious music-making. This was, the program informed 2000-odd Berliners of reassuringly mixed age and dress, the piece with which Rattle had made his debut on this podium, and it was the piece with which he had decided to go out. One Waldbühne concert remains, a family-affair confection featuring mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená (Rattle’s wife) singing Canteloube’s charming Auvergne songs and ending with Respighi’s bucket of proto-fascist lard “The Pines of Rome”; but this concert, on a warm June Wednesday, marked the end of the Rattle Era by consensus. As the orchestra prepared the program, the Italian interior minister announced plans to count up the country’s Roma population and deport the non-citizens. At the southern border of the United States, screaming toddlers were ripped from their mothers and locked in cages. In Rattle’s native United Kingdom, an hour or so before he took the podium, the government won the right to crash Britain out of the European Union without a deal. While the entering audience gabbed festively, the shuddering bass tones that usher in the symphony’s opening funeral march felt apt.
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