Soprano Lauren Snouffer performed with the NZSO.
It wasn't the first time the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra had programmed Mahler's Second Symphony as a song of farewell for its music director.
Twelve years ago, James Judd relinquished the post by conducting this symphonic titan; this weekend, Edo de Waart signed off his four years at the helm
with a performance of appropriately Mahlerian stature.
Gustav Mahler is the ultimate master of musical immersion. Massive orchestral and choral forces engulfed the Auckland Town Hall stage while off-stage, extra brass and percussion evoked the clamour of worlds beyond our concert hall confines. Inevitably, a rapt and near full house was easily won over, to the last soul.
De Waart's masterly entrapment set off with an inexorable first movement. The composer described this symphonic poem in its own right with unanswerable questions: "Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all nothing but a cruel jest?" — challenges made more vivid with tiptoe pianissimo, bittersweet woodwind tunes and wild orchestral storms.
Two dances followed. The first, sedately pleasant and cheerful, was set in the warm glow of the NZSO superb strings; the second was edgier, as if a song from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn had crossed to the dark side, with yodelling clarinets and clattering col legno strings.
