An all-pervading sense of finality characterised this programme presented by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Andrew Davis on Thursday night. Since 2014, the orchestra has been working its way through performing and recording all ten symphonies by Gustav Mahler. In the past two years I’ve heard Symphonies 5, 6 and 7 and based on these efforts the project has been a highly successful undertaking. His sixth Symphony was heard last year.

Perhaps proof that bad occurrences happen in threes, the composer’s decade-long tenure at the Vienna Opera had come to an end following bitter artistic squabbling, his older daughter died of scarlet fever and diphtheria and Mahler himself was diagnosed with an incurable heart valve defect. Amongst the chiming cowbells and beatific visions of Austrian rural bliss, we experienced in the Sixth Symphony an outburst of raucous mania and lonely fretfulness reaching its apex with a hefty mallet delivering two cracking thuds on a large wooden box, described as blows of fate striking the composer. Any possible gleam of hope was extinguished in the final bars. From this point the composer regarded death as inescapable. Three farewells followed: his Ninth Symphony, the incomplete Tenth and Das Lied...