Symphony No 6 in A minor

"The American conductor is scrupulous in his attention to detail - what characterful woodwind soloists, especially the oboe and cor anglais in the slow movement, and horn-players the Tonhalle Orchestra now has - but also in complete command of the bigger picture. The ordering of the central movements has an inevitable musical logic, which is entirely convincing. But this is far from a cool, objective reading - the surging, striving strings dig deep into the yearning melody of the Finale's opening bars - and the hammer blows of Fate (the third unplayed) register as harrowingly as in more feverish accounts of this great symphony." Sunday Times, 10th May 2009 ****

"His treatment of the first movement is a model of restraint, and by placing the slow movement before the scherzo (the order Mahler chose for the premiere, reversing that in the first edition of the printed score), he dilutes its baleful intensity even more. Yet that choice allows him to build the tension steadily through the scherzo into the vast finale, which is laid out with remarkable formal clarity, if not the sense of catastrophic power that some conductors bring to its hammer-blow climaxes." The Guardian, 24th April 2009 ****

"…David Zinman…opts to illuminate the complex web of contrapuntal lines that straddle each movement while at the same time underlining the composer's profound relationship to this symphonic predecessors. Thus the scherzo… has an impressive Brucknerian gravitas rather than the more manic or grotesque urgency favoured by some other interpreters." BBC Music Magazine, July 2009 ****

Having completed several cycles, among them the complete Beethoven symphonies (with over 1 million copies sold internationally), the orchestral works of R. Strauss and Schumann, in 2007 David Zinman & Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich embarked on this Mahler cycle. This is the sixth release, and the cycle will be completed in 2010.