A Finnish Finit

It’s a wrap!

The Music Academy of the West marked the finale of its 77th Summer Festival with the Academy Festival Orchestra at the Granada under Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu playing Mahler’s “Symphony No. 6 in A Minor, ‘Tragic.’”

Lintu, 56, graduated the Sibelius Academy in 1996 and took up the baton as chief conductor of the Orquestra Gulbenkian while continuing his tenure as chief conductor of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet.

The impressive hour and a half work, composed in 1903 includes the famous “Mahler hammer” in the last movement, which he insisted should sound “nonmetallic,” “like the fall of an axe.”

A fitting end to a glorious eight weeks of magnificent music…