Some symphonies can fill an entire evening with their emotional power and provocative ideas. Mahler’s Symphony No 6 is one such symphony.

During an apparently happy time in his life in 1903-04, Mahler set about writing a doleful, pessimistic symphony that would evolve into a compelling and exhilarating tussle with fate. Just a few years later, the darkness imagined in the symphony would invade Mahler’s life with shocking reality in the forms of illness, death and professional crisis. Did the three colossal hammer blows written-in to the symphony’s final movement seal its composer’s fate?

‘None of his works came as directly from his inmost heart as this’ – so said Mahler’s wife, Alma, of her husband’s Symphony No 6. The musicologist Deryck Cooke described the piece as ‘a tragic catastrophe is presented with stark objectivity.’ Kahchun Wong returns to the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra for Mahler’s most impactful and tragic symphony, an unmissable live music experience.