ISO packs house with a symphonic 'return to forever'

 Can you overdo it with a piece that challenges you to cheer and cry at the same time?  Music-lovers have

Gustav Mahler at 5, wondering if life is worth it. 

to answer that question for themselves, but the concert experience of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in D minor ("Resurrection") for me works out best with years in between in-person iterations. 

My first exposure to joining a big crowd for such a performance was in May 1987, when John Nelson capped off his 11-year tenure as Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra music director with an interpretation that explictly spoke to his  religious orientation: "The sentiments that are in the text are my sentiments," he told the Circle Theatre audience.

Certainly the second time I heard "Resurrection" almost effected a match between my sentiments and those of the texts the composer chose — from the folk poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and "Resurrection," an ode by Friedrich Klopstock — plus a huge supplement to them by the composer himself. It's important to underline the ecumenical appeal of the desire for eternal life as a universal yearning, not explicitly Christian, but rooted in Mahler's Jewish heritage and linked emotionally to his worldly struggles as artist and man.

So what was that second occasion? It was a concert in Carnegie Hall by the orchestra and singers from the Juilliard School, where both my sons were students. It took place just three months after 9/11, so the urge to find consolation from the trauma of mass death pervaded the performance. There was even the impending demise from cancer of the mezzo-soprano soloist. Lots of people were carrying heavy loads in the aftermath of the hijacked-planes attack.

I'll lightly touch on the third time, when the ISO presented the work in the 2009-10 season, again in May, under guest conductor Juanjo Mena. Based on how responsive the orchestra has been to its current music director, Jun  Märkl, and the improvements in the ensemble overall in the past 16 seasons, I eagerly anticipated Friday's performance, and I was not disappointed. 

My emotional response was understandably more controlled than in 2001 in New York City. It was axiomatic that there would be loads to appreciate in how Märkl would handle "Resurrection." The attention to detail was vivid and clarifying. Variations in pacing and texture always made sense, as they are keyed to Mahler's explicit demands in the score. 

There was no question that the tumult outlined from the start in the lower strings would have the right amount of contrast with the sweetness of the violins in a later theme. The landscape was broadly defined in this Allegro maestoso. The conductor rightly felt no need to observe the five-minute pause the score requires after the first movement; the composer himself asserted it wasn't mandatory.

Märkl guides two "Resurrections" this weekend.

But the next two movements move onto different terrain. The second movement is pastoral and lightly inflected by tender song, so much so that some eminent French composers, including Debussy, walked out of a Paris performance in 1910, calling the work reactionary, too much like Schubert. The charm worked on this audience, however, as in the ingratiating pizzicato episode for the strings after the second violins gingerly introduced it.

The scherzo movement that follows is another kettle of fish — particularly, the fish that St. Anthony of Padua preaches to in a piece drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The finny tribe is depicted as just as resistant to sermons as human congregations tend to be. Sardonic humor with a touch of bitterness hangs over this sprightly movement. Its ambivalence was much later nicely amplified as it provided the framework for a movement in Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," a 1968 surprise hit for orchestra and unconventional vocal ensemble. Delicacy and vigor sat together in neighborly fashion in Friday's performance of the scherzo; the music seems be searching for something, but did so in an orderly, suggestive way. 

Mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor provided the perfect bridge to the composer's long-delayed incorporation of the voice with the "Primal Light" movement, a brief, earnest expression of determination to meet God in the afterlife. Her warmth of expression set up the plausible breadth of one soul's wishful thinking toward all humanity as the Klopstock verse moved convincingly into Mahler's words, with O'Connor joined in earnest entreaty to Lauren Souffer's soaring soprano. 

The chorale that had been announced by the orchestra, impressively balanced and glowing in Friday's concert, is taken up by the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, expertly prepared by longtime director Eric Stark. At full strength, these singers never seemed under strain to overwhelm their instrumental colleagues.The power of the orchestra helps see to that. 

The climax is foreordained, and the most marvelous touch, allowing the audience to absorb the sentiments just expressed as it likely breathes heavily, is a brief coda that confirms what Mahler must have allowed himself to ponder with certainty, something like this: This is not about wishful thinking, but destiny.