The complex relationship between Gustav and Alma Mahler was the subject of Marin Alsop’s latest concert with the Philharmonia, offering us “a snapshot into this special couple”, as Alsop put it in an interview in the printed programme. Gustav’s Fifth Symphony and Blumine (a movement rejected from the First Symphony), flanked four of Alma’s songs, orchestrated by Colin and David Matthews and sung by US mezzo Sasha Cooke.
The symphony’s Adagietto is widely considered Mahler’s musical love letter to Alma, the first of several, if she is to be believed. Their relationship, however, came at the price of his insistence that she give up composition, a prohibition on which he backtracked during their marital crisis of 1910, following her affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The first of her several collections of songs was published the same year: dates of composition are unclear, but most were written before she met Mahler.
