Bright hope in dark times

What a journey through the powerful sound sculptures of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). As the moving "Opening Night" of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in the Elbphilharmonie under the direction of its chief conductor Alan Gilbert, they arose in their youngest form and shone. This start to the new season poured out hope like a grand prize. No less was the goal proclaimed by Gilbert before the concert in the secular church at the port.

“Hardly any other work has a greater symbolic importance in our time than Mahler's Second Symphony. It is with great pleasure that I look forward to the coming concert season, with which we want to send a signal for a new beginning and a new beginning," said Gilbert, who took over the direction of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009, exactly one hundred years after Gustav Mahler. Gilbert has been chief conductor in Hamburg since 2019, where Mahler not only worked as principal conductor in the opera house on Dammtorstraße from 1891 to 1897, but also as a celebrated concert conductor - and most recently in 1908 conducted a first concert in the newly opened Laeiszhalle.

The opening of the 2022/23 season in the Elbphilharmonie, which has been used since 2017, provided an opportunity for diverse reflections on the connections between pathos and idealism, between realism and optimism - between sober consideration and the movement that only art triggers in listeners, viewers and readers can. The great "symbolic importance" of the Second Symphony arises in its never fathomable variety from the genius of its composer. Mahler used every sound as material for his symphonies, in a first anticipation of New Music, which continues the principle more radically.

Parallel to the naturalism that emerged from realism in literature and drama, Mahler – years and decades ahead of his time – included elements of “low” music in his compositions, as he was also influenced by folk music, fire department bands and military music in his childhood. His first instrument was the accordion. Again and again he lets the orchestra dry up in the second, the "Resurrection Symphony" like a drying up brook, only to let it overflow again immediately, from a bubbling spring over the waterfall to the geyser.

Mahler experimented not only in the composition of the elements of his composition, but also progressively with instrumentation, new perspectives (apocalyptic horns) and instrumentation (big percussion, bells, etc.). In the Second Symphony he builds a tremendous arc of tension from the first movement, the "funeral celebration" to the fifth and last movement, which promises resurrection with a large choir.

The singing only begins in the fourth movement "Urlicht", in which the English mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly filled the large hall with her voice as elegantly as it was moving. The Mahler expert, who performed all of the composer’s vocal works with large orchestras in the 100th year of the composer’s death, proved to be the ideal prophetess of the redemption of faith, which is promised in the folksong text from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”: “The dear God will come to me Giving a little light will shine for me into eternal blissful life!"

Conolly's voice harmonizes splendidly with that of the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson, who sings title roles at major opera houses throughout Europe. Together with the large choir, which sounds wonderful in the Elbphilharmonie, made up of the NDR Vocal Ensemble (study: Klaas Stok) and the Rundfunkchor Berlin (study: Justus Barleben), an outstandingly coherent vocal wall was created behind the orchestra.

This in turn filled the podium, supplemented by seven scholarship holders from the NDR Orchestra Academy, with its 110 musicians. There was no gap. With his feather-light, balanced, empathetic and demanding style, Alan Gilbert got everything out of this powerful body of sound that was in it. More is not possible - at the season opening in times of the corona pandemic and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, as a result of which the energy crisis shook the whole world: pure hope.