Whether or not you believe in the afterlife it envisions, Mahler"s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, "Resurrection," is a life-affirming experience.
So was hearing it Saturday evening at Hill Auditorium, in a season-finale performance by the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Music Director Arie Lipsky, that was the ultimate in more ways than one.
The move to Hill from the Michigan Theater, the A2SO"s usual home, was prompted by the law of large numbers. There were more than 300 people on stage: 90-plus in the orchestra; 220-plus in the two choruses (the UMS Choral Union and the men"s chorus Measure for Measure, prepared, respectively, by Jerry Blackstone and Leonard Riccinto); and two soloists, soprano Katherine Larson and mezzo-soprano Deanna Relyea. But the audience - more than 2,700, according to A2SO Executive Director Mary Steffek Blaske - would also have overflowed the Michigan, by 1,000. It is rare to hear this huge, exalting Mahler work, and people (including many young people, not so often in attendance) knew it.
What they heard could only have thrilled. And not just because the orchestra, soloists and chorus were all local - though that is a matter for great pride. And not just because of the massive walls of sound Mahler can launch with as much ease as more delicate, restrained passages. The orchestra sounded glorious in the acoustic of Hill, inspired not just by Lipsky, perhaps, leading without a score and with a fervor appropriate to the music (he looked justifiably exhausted by the end), but by the hall and the ghosts of great orchestras who have graced the stage there.
The first movement was urgently declamatory, cataclysmic and so convincing that the lights seemed to dim at key moments; the second movement was plush and gracious; and the third movement had its split-personality, gay and biting, spot-on. Relyea was at the top of her game in the moving contralto solo "Urlicht," and Larson sang radiantly. But the ultimate vocal moment was the chorus entrance in the last movement, promising eternal life - "Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du. "Rise again, yes you will rise again" - with a sound that was breathtakingly instrumental and otherworldly. It was truly heavenly singing.
The performance had a few glitches - the offstage band was also somewhat off-pitch in some entrances; the ensemble was a little ragged in a few spots in the scherzo - but in the sweep, as well as the details, the performance spoke deeply.
The Mahler was prefaced by Susan Botti's "Impetuosity," another fine work from this University of Michigan composer. Evocative of the natural world, it was a lovely study in sonorities and in self-propelling motion. Botti made it for the Cleveland Orchestra; the A2SO did it ample justice on this evening where things made in Ann Arbor really glowed.
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©2002-2008
Ann Arbor Symphony
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Ann Arbor, MI 48108
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