Still they arrive: three excellent Mahler releases in as many months! How lucky am I? First Runnicles’ Fifth, then Petrenko’s Third and now No. 2, the mighty Resurrection.

This particular performance had a special significance for everyone present. It marked what seemed like a premature end to what had appeared the highly successful tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony. Salonen’s tenure there lasted only five or six years, including the COVID collapse, which is a surprisingly brief period for a conductor of his status (I remember reviewing a CBS recording of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with the top tier Philharmonia as long ago as 1986, when he was all of 25).

Following hot on the heels of Andris Nelsons’ bomb shell departure from Boston, you wonder what’s going on behind the boardroom’s green baize door. Unlike in Boston, Salonen’s reasons for leaving were relatively clear, despite being couched in the usual weasel-worded human resources media release – with a dash of AI – about “creative differences, contrasting trajectories and visions, inability ‘to join us on our journey’”. 

Salonen launched the 22-minute first movement like a rocket with a rugged intensity that recalls Klemperer; the insanely powerful, crushing brass chords that usher in the recapitulation have to be heard to be believed. Here is another case where taking a risk pays off. Just listen to the cellos and basses grind away at their trenchant, angry recitatives throughout the movement, or the supple, sensual violins at the opening of the second. Throughout the entire performance, the string sound was sleekly transparent yet with great depth and force where required. Salonen paced the opening movement – and the entire 80-minute symphony – masterfully, from the quietly doom-haunted early passages to the fiery conclusion. Klemperer took just 20 minutes over the opening movement where he set a slowish tempo and basically stuck to it (as he did so often). Salonen gives the movement a more nuanced and finely calibrated texture. Both approaches are equally valid.

In the second movement, beautiful beneficent phrasing and textures illuminated darker, almost Schubertian depths that emerged in the minor-key section. The airy pizzicato string and harp passage, perhaps mimicking a guitar, was as sweetly light-hearted as Mahler ever is, particularly when the piccolo and flute piped up. For some reason, it always reminds me of Tip Toe through the Tulips.

The scherzo, based on the Wunderhorn song about St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes rushes past in what I’ve come to regard as a sort of musical dialectic between Mahler’s atavistic Judaism and his new-found Catholicism, with perfect ensemble and plenty of sardonic bite. The fourth movement, Urlicht (Primal Light), another song from the Wunderhorn collection, leaves no doubt about its philosophical orientation. The poem describes an encounter between an anguished soul wishing to die and return to God, and an angel seeking to turn him back to life. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke sings majestically, with eloquent directness and ever-increasing tonal splendour.

Urlicht leads directly into the challengingly complicated last movement, which surely invokes Mahler’s own credo that a symphony must embrace the entire world, in this case from the gates of hell to the threshold of heaven. It can also be a graveyard (pun intended) for an otherwise fine performance by either rushing fences or becoming becalmed and losing momentum. No chance of that here. The march of the dead is recklessly defiant and the sound of a lone bird is imbued with a chillingly haunting quality, as if reminding us as to just how far we from earthly hubbub.  By the time the tender strains of Klopstock’s Resurrection Ode (and a poem by the composer himself) steal in, the glow of heaven is glimpsed. The movement concludes with an immense, pages-long climax. 

The performance and recording as a whole are nothing short of magnificent. The San Francisco Symphony Chorus sings with celestial glory as do both Cooke and soprano Heidi Stober who blend perfectly. The sound in San Francisco’s Davis Hall is excellent. Nothing will ever topple Klemperer or Bernstein, but this runs them very close.

Listen on Apple Music

Composer: Mahler
Works: Symphony No 2 in C minor, Resurrection
Performers: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Esa-Pekka Salonen
Label: SFS Media