HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK - Mahler 2nd 'Resurrection' Symphony

In 1973 the BBC broadcast a series of Norton Lectures by Leonard Bernstein entitled The Unanswered Question. In them he investigates the origins and universality of music. They were broad ranging lectures, incorporating Chomsky, the historical development of music and the human condition and zeitgeist of their time, as represented through musical forms.

My encounter with these lectures, I didn't realise at the time quite how much they'd influenced my thinking and beliefs about the role of music in general. Bernstein lectures also introduced to me pieces by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and most importantly, through his lecture largely about the 9th Symphony - to Gustav Mahler. It is one of the boons of the internet, that this material is being made available.

Mahler 'Resurrection' Symphony - Claudio Abbado

This week I watched a video concert in Lucerne from 2003, conducted by Claudio Abbado of Mahler's 2nd ' Resurrection' Symphony - it is a masterly interpretation. Though it's been many years since I first listened to this Symphony, it was like becoming reacquainted with an old friend. With many past exhilarating experiences arising from it. 

In the1980's I lived in London, and attended numerous Prom performances. An early concert was of Mahler's 2nd, with the sublime soprano Jessye Norman. As the symphony reached its final climax, there was a huge orchestra, a huge choir and the huge Albert Hall organ all belting out full pelt, and on this ocassion Norman's beautiful voice softly soaring with an effortless intensity rising up, to hover like a small bird over this climactic cacophony. I found this so utterly thrilling, I experienced an explosion of bliss that shot through and around my body.

Listening to the 2nd Symphony again this week I was struck by this experience once again. The 'Resurrection' is the apotheosis of the late Romantic symphonies. A quality embedded in a Mahler symphony is the depth of emotional range it contains in its dramatic panoramas, textures and tones. Within the waves and frequency of its passionate upswellings and fluctuations, there is ultimately something gloriously transcendent waiting to burst out of it at any moment. And just occasionally this can strike you full on. 

My personal preference for the 2nd Symphony

Mahler creates a context for this sort of emergence through his symphonies, as much via the subtlety of the orchestration, as its furious intensity. He conjures a place where emotional resonance can 'resurrect' your own connection with, however you configure it,  something universal or ultimate, that is locked within us. Mahler's music, on these occasions, acts as a key to unlock a lived experience of re-connection.