Resurrection

So magnificent was the CBSO's performance of Mahler's 1st. Symphony under Sakari Oramo last November, that I've been champing at the bit in anticipation knowing that they were to play his 2nd. Symphony in March. I guess that if I were exiled to that famous desert island and was down to the "if you could take only one" question, then the Resurrection Symphony would be the one I'd want. Yes, even above Raff. I think that it's because it's a journey (well, the final journey), it has the humanity of voices and, above all, it has so much consolation and hope in that spine-tinglingly joyous choral finale.

So, no pressure on Oramo, then.

There is sometimes a free talk before the concert and if we have time we always like to go along. This one was about the piece which was preceding the Mahler, Thea Musgrave's Concerto for Orchestra. The guy doing the talk didn't really do her any favours. He started out by playing excerpts from a couple of works which, it turned out, were rather less accessible than the Concerto itself. Whilst the latter was clearly not going to become a favourite piece of ours, we like to think that we approach modern music with open ears. Much was made by him of the fact that some of the players are freed from the conductors beat and can play in "free time" and this was also explained by Oramo when he came on to conduct the work.

Actually, it turned out to be reasonably tonal, have some interesting, if always fleeting, sound combinations and to be, naturally, quite devoid of anything resembling a sustained melody. Much had been made by both the speaker and Oramo of the "rebellion" of the clarinet and, sure enough, towards the end of the 20 minute work the clarinettist stands up and leads a gradually growing company of standing soloists who appear to ignore the conductor. I was left feeling that it was all a bit naive, that something was lacking in the music if the players had to give such an obvious sign of what their instrument was doing.

After the interval came the Mahler. It didn't disappoint. I have three or four recordings of the work and we have been lucky enough to see it performed in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen, but we agree that we've never heard the like of this performance. The three purely instrumental movements had all the drama, sweet lyricism and huge dynamic contrasts that Oramo had brought to his earlier rendition of the 1st. The added vocal dimension came in the two final movements; the first a beautifully sung song for alto performed by Jane Irwin, who we'd heard only recently in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde when she stood in for the indisposed Anne Sofie von Otter.

Most of the finale is orchestral, majoring on a tremendous march which gave a prominent role to two snare drummers (who arrived, snare drummed, and then disappeared!) This gives way to the last trump (off stage horns and trumpets), before the chorus at last makes its entry. Here Oramo the showman was to the fore. Having been seated throught the work when they had nothing to do, they stayed sitting and didn't use music, so visually nothing changed and nothing distracted your attention from the choir's pianissimo entry. Oramo's wife, soprano Anu Comsi, didn't make much of an impression on us, seeming to be very much outclassed by Irwin, but that hardly mattered - she didn't have much to do. Oramo wound up the drama with visual clues towards the end: the choir rose to their feet, the offstage wind band made a prominent entry to stand either side of the organ as the rest of the orchestra built up to the glorious closing fortissimo pages.

The rapturous reaction of the (almost capacity) audience was utterly deserved. The performance was everything that we had hoped it would be. A shame that Oramo doesn't seem to have recorded the work.

Even being kept waiting half an hour for our table at Bank didn't spoil the evening!

Listen to the final few minutes of Mahler's 2nd. Symphony