The Limelight Recording of the Month for February 2022 is the final instalment of Ádam Fischer’s remarkable Mahler cycle. Six years in the making, Fischer’s outstanding series of recordings on the German label Avi Music concludes with the tragic complexities of the epic Sixth Symphony. Every issue to date has won paise and plaudits for the conductor, the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra, and for the engineering alike. Clive Paget caught up with the Hungarian maestro to discuss the Sixth Symphony in particular, his approach to the musically and emotionally demanding Bohemian composer and his sound world, and why he won’t conduct the Tenth.

Ádam Fischer

Ádam Fischer. Photo © Nikolaj Lund.

Congratulations on another magnificent Mahler recording. Tell me, when did you begin your cycle on disc? And did you always intend to finish with the Sixth?

We started with the Seventh Symphony [released in 2016]. It was not only an artistic question, because we had to produce the recordings from concerts and in the studio later. We always knew we wanted to do all the symphonies, and I asked the management not to start with the most difficult, because I wanted to...