The Hallé Orchestra, Natalya Romaniw, Claudia Huckle, Halle Choir

Jamie Phillips - conductor
Natalya Romaniw - soprano
Claudia Huckle - contralto
Hallé Choir

Programme
Mahler - Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’

We end the 2017-2018 season with Mahler’s spectacular vision of life, death and the hereafter. Massing colossal forces, it distils the heights and depths of mankind’s experience into a compelling eighty-minute drama.

Beginning with the heavy tread of an imposing funeral march, Mahler leads an implacable quest for meaning in an anguished world, some solace taken in the recall of forgotten pleasures and the consoling folk poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

His familiar sardonic humour is there, too, in a wickedly entertaining waltz, but all irony is dispelled in the vast finale, a vivid depiction of last judgement and resurrection. Hushed expectation and distant fanfares open out into a triumphant chorale and an overwhelming vista on eternity, still one of the most hair-raising climaxes in musical history.