Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 (1928 version), occupies just nine minutes in a concert program — but inside those minutes, Simon Rattle finds a world. In the first episode of a new video series by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the chief conductor offers a rare combination of rehearsal footage and personal reflection, revealing how this elusive work takes shape.
Each movement is brief, often cryptic, but nothing is incidental. Webern wrote the work in 1909, the same year Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony. While Mahler expands time, Webern compresses it. The Six Pieces are sharply etched psychological episodes — “six little nightmares,” as Rattle calls them — intimately connected with the death of the composer’s mother. The first is a presentiment of disaster, the second a fulfillment of disaster, ending in what might be the first musical depiction of a panic attack.
Throughout the rehearsal, Rattle guides the BRSO through fragments and phrases that demand both precision and expressive weight. A pizzicato is “a pebble dropped into a lake.” A slash from the strings feels like “a knife across the face.” A funeral march unfolds with tolling bells, dense percussion, and what he describes as “a staggering piece of psychological theatre.”
He also recalls a formative experience: as a teenager in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he played these same pieces under Pierre Boulez. “Anyone who was in the orchestra,” Rattle says, “could write out whole passages from memory — you were given the emotion of it directly.” Boulez once described one passage as “the last drops of water coming out of a bottle.” For Rattle, it might also be “drops of blood on glass.”
What makes the piece so difficult is not only its brevity and precision, but the space it leaves. Silence is a key part of the language, and the musicians must listen deeply across the ensemble to find balance in single gestures — often with no harmonic support. “It has to sound as expressive as Mahler or Schumann or Brahms,” Rattle insists.
The first video captures Rattle’s reflections and the rehearsal process. The second presents the full performance of Webern’s Six Pieces with the BRSO.
Watch the rehearsal and commentary (Episode 1 of the BRSO’s new series):
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