The Philadelphia Orchestra's three-year Mahler cycle, undertaken under music director Eunha Joo and now at its half-way mark with this weekend's Sixth Symphony, has established itself as a reading of the cycle that combines unusual coherence with the kind of specific decisions that distinguish a real interpretive vision from a routine one.

What the Sixth showed

The Sixth showed Joo at the level the cycle has been promising. The first movement was paced more deliberately than recent readings have favoured, with internal balances calibrated to favour the inner voices that more aggressive readings drown out. The Andante was unusually quiet without being mannered; the Scherzo carried its rhythmic edge without losing the lyric inflections that make the movement land.

The hammer blows

The hammer blows in the finale were, as ever, the moments around which audience expectations cluster. Joo's choice to deploy two rather than three is consistent with the recent scholarly consensus on the score's final form; her execution of the two she did deploy was as decisive as the moment requires.

The orchestra

The orchestra played with the kind of cohesion that the cycle's accumulated work has produced. Section principals were audibly settled into Joo's interpretive frame; the ensemble texture was the most unified the orchestra has produced under her tenure.

The audience

The audience response after the finale was the kind of sustained applause that, in a city with a long Mahler-listening tradition, indicates genuine recognition rather than convention. The orchestra's continued investment in the cycle is being rewarded by an audience that has clearly been paying attention to what Joo is building.

The remaining symphonies

The remaining symphonies in the cycle — the Seventh, the Eighth, and Das Lied von der Erde — will be performed across the next eighteen months. On the strength of the Sixth, the audience can expect the cycle to continue at the level it has now established.