Saturday night's concert featuring the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra and the Handel Society chorus in Mahler's Symphony #2 "Resurrection" was inspirational. This was the most serious and ambitious undertaking of the term and probably of the past year.
Conductor James Bolle illustrated the incredible feel and versatility of his orchestra. The crescendi and climaxes were almost always well prepared and, with the possible exception of the third movement, there always seemed to be a clear interpretation which made sense of the highly chromatic, tonally ambiguous music.
The opening of the final movement was an emotional experience. The profound questions carefully posed in the opening movement are finally being dealt with in the music and after a glorious passage the chorus enters silently onto the stage and sings its first lines pianissisimo and a capella.
Soloists soprano May Burgess and contralto Marion Dry were also quite good. Their voices were strong enough to project over the titanic sound yet expressive enough to give nuance and humility to their singing.
The work itself is monumental and highly charged. As the title suggests, it deals with the role of death and what meaning it gives to life and afterlife. Gustav Mahler's music owes a large debt to one composer on whom his international conducting reputation was made, Richard Wagner.
Beethoven's fingerprints can also be seen in this work, right down to the choral entry in the last movement, which was so effectively sung Saturday evening.
To prepare for such a monumental task, Melinda O'Neal, conductor of the Handel Society, began rehearsing last term and from their opening lines their knowledge and understanding of the score was never in doubt.
The concert was not entirely without its faults, occasionally the brass would struggle with pitch when exposed, the constantly exaggerated gestures of Bolle's conducting pattern prevented layers of dynamics and intricate nuance within the movements. Also his tendency to conduct forte and fortissimo with the same character and scope of beat would occasionally drown out the chorus in the swell of orchestral playing.
But the whole was far more significant than the sum of its parts. This performance found the soul of Mahler and gave its audience an experience it will not soon forget.
