Gustav Mahler, the most neurotically tortured egotist in music, has his fans, God knows, but of his 10 symphonies, the one least infected by Mahleria, or Mahler hysteria, is the Sixth.

That’s because you almost never hear it. It’s one of his most interesting, although you’d hardly know it, thanks to the far more popular First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth Symphonies.

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Bramwell Tovey, is programming the rarely played Symphony No. 6 in A Minor on Saturday and Monday (June 6 and 8) at the Orpheum with only one other work, Franz Schubert’s ballet music from Rosamunde. It’ll be a more than full evening: the Sixth is almost 85 minutes long.

Why so rarely played? For the simple reason that, aside from requiring 100 players, it’s no fun fest, though none of them is. (The concept of fun is antipodean to the grimly serious Mahler.) Even so, this symphony in relentless A minor is definitely his bleakest, and was nicknamed “The Tragic”, though Mahler decided to drop the subtitle after the premiere.

VSO violinist Joan Blackman, as concertmaster, thinks the Sixth is one of Mahler’s best symphonies and that they’re all tragic. “The detailed instruction in German means a lot of preparation,” she says. “Practically every note has a special articulation or dynamic instruction, and so we have to pay a lot of attention to detail. Every note has so much meaning.”

It is a very odd work: his most conventional in form but his least conventional expressively. As the music writer Norman Lebrecht says, the 1906 Symphony No. 6 “sounded a second warning of approaching war and delivered the most pessimistic finale in symphonic literature, a bleak prognosis penned in the summer of his greatest happiness”.

Mahler was happy because he wrote the work at his summer vacation home in Lake Wí¶rth in 1903 and 1904; had recently married Alma Schindler, whom he adored; had one child and another on the way; was seeing his music become widely accepted; and had recently become the director of the prestigious Vienna Opera.

His happiness was short. Soon three bad things happened: his firstborn daughter died of scarlet fever, he was forced to resign from the Vienna Opera due to plots against him, and he learned that he had a serious heart condition.

Somehow he had anticipated tragedy while at his happiest. His wife, Alma, said that “none of his works came as directly from his innermost heart as this one.” At the premiere in Essen in 1906, which he had dreaded, Mahler left the stage, went back to his dressing room, and sobbed uncontrollably. Through to the end, this relentless symphony leaves no room for hope.

The third of the three massive hammer strikes that stand in for fateful events was later deleted by the superstitious Mahler, who thought it might be tempting misfortune to leave the last one in (or at least so said Alma, though it sounds too good to be true). Mahler said that he wanted these crashing blows, which occur in the mammoth half-hour-long last movement, to be struck by a sledgehammer on a resonant surface, to represent the hammer blows of fate, and he wanted them to sound like an axe, and unmetallic. Another unusual instrument he calls for is a birch switch, aside from his usual cowbells.

The work has the distinction of a famous confusion on the part of Mahler, who wasn’t sure where to put the “Scherzo” movement, second or third. Originally he placed it second, then he changed his mind, then changed it back again.

This uncertainty prompted some ridicule from music critics but many conductors today put the “Scherzo” in third place, which is what Tovey is doing, and it does make sense to position this terrifying movement here, where it completely upsets the tense calm of the preceding “Andante”.

Joan Blackman’s husband, viola player Larry Blackman, says it’s one of the more dangerous pieces to perform and recalls when a young Brian Priestman, now the conductor of the Colorado Symphony, was assigned the two hammer blows in a performance by one of the London orchestras.

“Priestman brought down the hammer in a mighty blow and the head of the hammer broke off, bounced, and hit the first horn player in the head, knocking him out cold,” he says. “Not only were they now without the first horn, when the conductor cued Priestman to play the second hammer blow, all he had to use was the broken shaft, which couldn’t produce the requisite sound.”

In other words, two fateful blows.