Why you should experience Mahler's "Epic" Second Symphony with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra

EPIC! 

The thrilling symphonies of Gustav Mahler, one of the greatest of all orchestral composers, dare us to use the most extreme adjectives to describe them:

Vast!
Gigantic!
Thundering!
Overwhelming!
Colossal!

A dozen or so heroic musical canvases, each lasting over an hour and composed in a little more than 2 decades around the beginning of the 20^th century, Mahler’s symphonic works were designed to stretch the modern orchestra to a size hardly ever imagined before, adding (like Beethoven) choruses and vocal soloists, but also a whole range of other new instruments and sounds: raucous army bands, sweet mountain cowbells, a vast and specially constructed drum and the deafening clang of a blacksmith’s anvil.

As well as being a composer, Mahler was also one of the greatest conductors in musical history, and Beethoven and Mozart were his heroes. But in his own music he sought to transform what he had learned from the music of the past into a completely new language of the future, to create a music capable of facing the torrent of change and suffering that was to be the 20^th century and what lay beyond.

As the late Pierre Boulez said: “Mahler was prophetic!” Or as another great musician said: “In Mahler, we hear all of musical history: the past, the present and the future!” 

Rafael Payare’s first subscription concert as Music Director of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in October 2019 featured a stunning performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and he has since conducted the First and Fourth Symphonies. But early on he made it clear that his dream was to open our wonderful newly renovated Jacobs Music Center with the Second Symphony and follow it soon afterwards with the Third. These two symphonies, with their highly complex demands on performing space and acoustical requirements, and their need for choruses and soloists, played a significant role in the re-design of the stage and the addition of our magnificent new choral terrace.

Opening this new season in our beloved and reimagined home with Mahler’s glorious Second Symphony – most appropriately named the “Resurrection” Symphony – will bring alive to all of us exactly why this daring renovation was so necessary. To listen to music of this caliber, we need a hall to match it and do justice to it.

Here in Southern California, we live close to the home of modern cinema, and it is worth noticing that Mahler, though he died 20 years before the invention of sound movies, is one of the composers who had the greatest influence on the new art of film music. Innumerable famous movie composers have copied from him or been inspired by him, and his own life-story – from provincial poverty in a large Jewish family in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, to being one of the most famous musicians in the world – has a strikingly cinematic quality to it.

And Mahler’s life and work have been the actual material of many movies, from a swathe of documentary films about him from the 1960s onwards to recent movies about orchestral conductors, like Tár, and the Bernstein biopic, Maestro, with Bradley Cooper, in which the most important scene shows the great American conductor directing this same Second Symphony in the ancient English cathedral of Ely in 1973. Mahler’s music is often used in movies where a feeling of tragedy and grandeur is required, as in the 1971 ‘Death in Venice’, by Luchino Visconti.

As a conductor, Mahler was one of the first to travel the world, working in opera houses including Budapest and Hamburg (where Johannes Brahms was astonished by Mahler’s direction of Mozart), before ending up as Music Director of what was then the greatest opera house in Europe, the Vienna Court Opera. From there he moved to the United States, making his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1908 and then becoming Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.

It was half a century later that Leonard Bernstein followed Gustav Mahler as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, and one of the greatest innovations that the young Bernstein brought about during his leadership in New York was in transforming the experience of the music-loving public – at first in New York and across the USA, and later right across the world – by initiating a new commitment to Mahler’s music, programming his symphonies in concert after concert, broadcasting them on radio and on television, and (in the brave new age of hi-fi) recording them so that music-lovers everywhere could buy the records and listen to Mahler’s heart-rendingly beautiful music in their own homes

Why is this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and their Music Director Rafael Payare, not to be missed?

It has been very many years since our orchestra last performed this wonderful music and – now! - we can listen to this EPIC musical story, filled with humanity and some of the world’s loveliest melodies, in the astonishing new world-class acoustic of our very own Jacobs Music Center.

Mahler famously observed: “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” This Second Symphony is indeed a whole world, a sweeping expression of human experience from life to death, and enriching our lives as listeners with almost incredible, texture and understanding.

For our own much loved orchestral musicians, the chance to perform this fabulous score is an opportunity to for them to show their art and their ability at the highest levels.

And, at the simplest level, listening to this music will give you, the audience, the chance to hear the whole range of what is acoustically possible to the musical imagination: from the quietest imaginable sounds to some of the loudest ever created!

Don’t miss this historic moment in the history of music in San Diego!
Get your tickets here: https://www.sandiegosymphony.org/performances/resurrection-mahler-and-the-jacobs-music-center/!

I personally cannot wait to see you in our new hall, and for us to experience together the full majesty and power of our hall, our orchestra, our Music Director and this magnificent piece of music!

Rafael Payare has created this program to fill the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center with the sounds it was created for, sounds to fill our hearts and ears and dreams.

 -Martha Gilmer, President & CEO, San Diego Symphony