Mahler and Tchaikovsky’s starkly contrasting treatments of childhood, brilliantly conveyed.

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
May 8, 2015

The aging demographic of classical music concertgoers is a trendy source of conversation these days. On this occasion, the whole audience, both young and old, found themselves transported back to the world of childhood via the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. This really was a concert in two halves, as the treatment of childhood could not have been more stark; the contrast was brilliantly conveyed by the orchestra and solo singers.

Perhaps no other composer – or indeed artist more generally – was so obsessed with children and childhood as Gustav Mahler; more bizarrely, he was always conscious of death as the counterpoint to the innocence of childhood: he did after all write a whole song cycle on the subject matter of the death of children, following the death of his own daughter. In the Wunderhorn cycle we get this same, almost manic obsession with children and death. The cycle is based on an anthology of poems that were collated in the early 19th century; as such...