Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 9 October 2025
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”
Dudamel’s final season in Los Angeles continues with Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. While it is only the third concert in the season, it is sure to be the highlight. Mahler’s 2nd is as epic as music gets and popular to perform during conductor’s last seasons with their orchestras. Within the last year the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed it along with the London Symphony Orchestra. The MET gave free concerts under Nézet-Séguin, who will continue his excellent Philadelphia Orchestra Mahler cycle with a performance in 2026. Luisi performed this symphony as part of his final season with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, as did Zweden for his with the New York Philharmonic. Orozco-Estrada said goodbye to the Houston Symphony Orchestra with it, Elder to the Hallé last year at the Proms, and the same for Salonen in San Francisco, and now Dudamel here in Los Angeles. Does Mahler’s popularity and frequency of performances risk turning what should be a remarkable event into routine? As a Mahler fan, I can appreciate the bounty of performances but this piece calls for a sense of occasion and must sound special, not standard. Performing it is a big ordeal. A huge orchestra is packed on stage along with a full choir, two soloists, and off-stage brass. Executing this monumental endeavor is exhausting enough with an approximate hour and a half runtime and no intermission. The sheer logistics of pulling it off is are feat unto itself let alone being able to make any kind of artistic statement, especially after such luminaries have left their mark with legendary recordings made by Mahler’s own acolytes Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter as well as perhaps the most famous advocate, Leonard Bernstein. This is what Bradley Cooper conducted in the film “Maestro” and may be the most likely of all the completed nine symphonies to convert new fans to Mahler’s music.
I should note my personal bias in that Mahler’s 2nd Symphony is one of my favorites in all of art, not just music. It represents the pinnacle in creative expression. I love it so much I have heard it performed three times this year alone. The first in Amsterdam with Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra as part of the Concertgebouw’s Mahler Festival. The second with Marin Alsop conducting the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. And now Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the third time in 2025. How good was it? I bought tickets to the next performance Friday morning to make it a fourth. Fischer brings years of insight and raw bohemian soul, Alsop a brilliant Viennese luster of sound. But Dudamel? With Dudamel you sense the spirit of the music is flowing through the man himself and passed on to his many musicians. The spark that inspired Mahler to write this symphony in the first place and the universality it speaks to in all of us emanates Dudamel’s conducting who does it all from memory without using a score.
You don’t need a narrative understanding of Mahler’s music to enjoy it but Dudamel shares in his notes that the heroic protagonist of Mahler’s 1st symphony is now dead in the 2nd. It is his inevitable death that inspires the first movement’s funeral march and subsequent movements. This hero is not only an avatar for Mahler but for all of us, as this symphony’s aim is to convey as much of the human experience as possible through music. A casual listener may not be able to articulate back the same narrative as what these notes indicate, but anyone can sense the enormous depth of emotion from all of life’s anguish and beauty contained within the music. By the end of the first movement the playing communicates a genuine sense of loss that lingers until the very end when the orchestra is able to lift our spirits again. Dudamel’s sweet sounding second movement is intentionally incongruous from the rest of the symphony, allowing it to stand out as more than a mere peaceful prelude between the first and fifth movements that dominate its structure. It serves as a lyrical echo of the life whose passing we mourn in the first movement. The third movement is the opposite view on life and is as churlish and sardonic as you could hope for this side of Klemperer. After reflecting on the unavoidable loss of life in all its sweetness and bitterness, we arrive at the choral fourth and fifth movements. The fourth intimately features a solo gloriously sung by mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor that bridges us into the fifth and longest movement with the whole choir. This is a symphony that asks what is the meaning of life? Why do we live and suffer, is it all some cruel joke? Mahler seeks to answer these questions in the finale, where Dudamel truly makes his mark. The movement starts with a view of the apocalypse and a massive march of the dead. After a serene silence, the chorus sings we do not live in vain, that there is more to this world than we can see and we are all divinely saved. The music matches the text with choir, orchestra, and organ at full force. The immense energy of hundreds of musicians each emitting their own sound was overwhelming. By the end, I have never been more moved by a live performance of this symphony. To prove it wasn’t a one-off, I had a comparable emotional response to the point of tears hearing it a second time the following morning. All the musicians involved rose to the occasion to make this the special event it rightfully should be.
With other performances, aside from the glorious finale I am left with treasured memories usually centered around their unique sound such as the massive power of the tam-tam and raw playing in Fischer’s performance or the elegance of the Viennese strings that grounds Alsop’s performance to a place that is authentic for Mahler’s sound world. Dudamel and the LA Phil’s sound goes beyond surface-level temporal characteristics and directly to the heart of the emotion behind the music. Musicians performing in modern orchestras are as well trained as they have ever been. The generations that populate their ranks have been playing Mahler since their student days and know these scores as well as any in the standard repertoire. The challenge for any conductor or any leader is: can you get the best from the people around you, elevating them to the best of their abilities and towards a collective whole? This is what Dudamel does better than any conductor active today and most evident in his interpretations of Mahler. I could perhaps have used more effrontery from the brass and percussion at times, but Dudamel’s interpretation doesn’t seek histrionics. Those who seek greater meaning from art, from life, who are moved by the spiritual effect great art can have, can attend this performance and have those beliefs reaffirmed.
Dudamel previously performed this piece with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl and in the Disney Hall with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela as part of his 2012 Mahler Project. His thrilling BBC Proms performance with the Venezuelan orchestra is easily found online, an even more amazing performance with the Berlin Philharmonic is on their subscription service, and there is a rare misfire with the Munich Philharmonic on DVD/Blu-ray whose warm but softer, more mellow sound is better suited for Bruckner than Mahler. If this LA performance gets out, it’ll be the best of them all. Dudamel and The LA Phil will perform this piece on tour with local choirs across Asia along with last week’s program of two Stravinsky ballets and the new Adams short symphony “Frenzy”.
The symphony is titled the “Resurrection”, nobody knows if Mahler genuinely believed in it as he wrote this symphony prior to his conversion to Catholicism, rejecting his Jewish background so he could become a qualified candidate to be appointed conductor of the Vienna Court Opera in anti-semitic Austria at the turn of the 20th century. The music’s power is beyond any specific religious tradition. Mahler described the work as if it came from another world. I don’t know what Dudamel’s spiritual beliefs are, but I felt he believes in the transformative power of music, in the transcendent power of beauty, and we are all blessed to have witnessed his sermon.
