June 4, 6 & 7, 2026
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center
Atlanta, GA – USA
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Nathalie Stutzmann, conductor; Talise Trevigne, soprano; Rihab Chaieb, mezzo-soprano;ASO Chorus (Norman Mackenzie, director or choruses).
Gustav MAHLER: Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”
Mark Gresham | 23 JUN 2026
Certain repertoire choices for season-ending finale concerts endure because they answer a recurring need. In uncertain times, orchestras often reach instinctively for music that affirms rather than questions, and few composers knew better than Mahler how to transform anxiety into exaltation.
When selecting Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Atlanta was hardly alone. At least a half-dozen American orchestras chose Mahler’s Second as their closing gesture this 2025–26 season, though among the nation’s larger ensembles, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Colorado Symphony stood largely by themselves in embracing the work as a formal finale this time around.
Regional orchestras like Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tulsa Symphony Orchestra, and Santa Barbara Symphony, as did the smaller-budget regional community orchestra Glacier Symphony of Kalispell, Montana (metro population ~100,000), also ended their seasons with Mahler’s Second. Other orchestras such as Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh programmed it elsewhere in the season, but not as the season closer.
One suspects there are easier ways to bid farewell to a season than assembling a vast orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists for nearly an hour and a half of existential struggle, but apparently easier ways hold less appeal.
There is a certain quality to Mahler’s grand design that conductors and administrators find irresistible. The “Resurrection” Symphony is a monument that reliably fills seats and sends patrons into the night feeling they have participated in something larger than themselves. Few works conclude with greater theatrical certainty or offer audiences a more emphatic assurance that, after earthly trials and tribulations, redemption awaits in radiant C major.
For the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose 2025–26 season concluded June 4–7 at Atlanta Symphony Hall, the programming choice felt both familiar and fitting.
The orchestra’s relationship with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 stretches back more than half a century. Michael Palmer, then associate conductor, led early performances in 1975 during Robert Shaw’s tenure as music director, the first known performance by the ASO. Shaw himself returned to the work in May 1980, with a landmark presentation, and again in April 1988 during his final years with the orchestra.
Under Yoel Levi, Mahler’s Second became a recurring touchstone. He conducted it a total of three times, including a 2-disc Telarc CD set (CD-80548) from performances during his final season.
The Second Symphony reappeared in 2012 under principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles, which underscored its continued symbolic weight for the orchestra. Then music director Robert Spano opened the 2015–16 season with it, using its expansive architecture as an inaugural statement rather than a culminating one.
Now the work has returned to its ceremonial role of closing the ASO season under music director Nathalie Stutzmann, once again linking the present moment to a lineage that reaches back to the beginnings of the orchestra’s modern identity.
To grasp this performance in light of that lineage, let’s look at the differences between what Stutzmann has wrought in this concert and the interpretations of two previous conductors, Yoel Levi and Donald Runnicles, as the most conspicuous contrasts.
By the time Yoel Levi came to record and perform Mahler’s Second Symphony at the end of his Atlanta tenure, he had already spent nearly two decades shaping the ASO into an orchestra of remarkable discipline and polish. The resulting interpretation is, in many respects, a portrait of the conductor himself.
Levi’s Mahler is descended more from Bruno Walter and George Szell than from Leonard Bernstein. Critics writing of the CD have repeatedly remarked on its lucidity, natural pacing, and refusal to indulge in emotional excess, emphasizing Levi’s concern for architecture, dynamics, balance, internal detail, and ensemble over overt theatricality. The emotions are there, but they are disciplined rather than worn on the sleeve. Levi tended to conduct long spans rather than isolated moments. He rarely employed conspicuous tempo manipulations or exaggerated rubato. Instead, climaxes emerge organically. The final pages achieve grandeur “naturally” and without forcing. One hears a conductor concerned with the whole cathedral rather than the carvings on individual stones.
Runnicles brought considerably more darkness and emotional volatility. His Mahler Second was more overtly dramatic and deeply concerned with the spiritual conflict underlying the work. He also found a “sweetness” amid the symphony’s ferocity. If Levi’s approach is architectural, Runnicles’ is psychological. Levi builds the cathedral; Runnicles inhabits it.
Stutzmann belongs to a group of conductors for whom atmosphere and sonority take precedence—the composer’s architecture and finer details be damned. Whether with Mahler, Bruckner, Strauss tone poems, or even Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, one hears a conductor willing to focus upon and linger over sonorities above all else.
That comparison is rather telling. The same symphony, heard through those three conductors over a quarter-century, reveals not merely three personalities but three distinct philosophies of music-making. Levi sought coherence and proportion, Runnicles spiritual drama and humanity, and Stutzmann color and atmosphere. In that sense, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony has served Atlanta not simply as a recurring masterpiece, but as a mirror reflecting the changing priorities, for better or for worse. One could do worse than trace the evolution of orchestral taste through a single resurrection.
Instead of the entire Symphony, let’s look at the central “Scherzo” in performance. It is there, if anywhere, conductors reveal themselves.
Mahler himself called the movement “the voice of disbelief.” Based on his Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (“St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes”), it depicts humanity’s endless capacity to hear profound truths, nod solemnly, and then return unchanged to old habits. It is irony, futility, grotesquerie, and despair disguised as a dance.
And each of the conductors compared above approaches that bitter “Scherzo” rather differently:
Levi’s “Scherzo” is remarkably elegant. As BBC Magazine noted, “Levi lets the phrases float and billow.” The movement possesses gentleness and transparency rather than sarcasm. The textures remain lucid, the rhythms supple, and the music sings. Mania is carefully controlled. One hears the ländler roots and the contrapuntal craftsmanship more than the existential nightmare. The fish continue swimming in circles, to be sure, but Levi observes the scene with something approaching amused detachment—a conductor who trusts Mahler’s structure and refuses to underline every irony in red ink.
Runnicles’ temperament is naturally drawn to the movement’s darker implications. He tends to emphasize the movement’s relentless circularity. Those endless spinning figures become psychologically troubling rather than merely witty. His Mahler generally combines warmth and boldness with incisive orchestral definition and emotional urgency. The sudden shriek before the recapitulation—the famous outburst Mahler described as a cry of disgust—arrives not as a theatrical effect but almost as a genuine spiritual crisis. Under Runnicles, one senses the dance has become compulsive. People continue smiling because they no longer know how to stop. Where Levi sees satire, Runnicles finds tragedy. One leaves the movement feeling that St. Anthony’s sermon has failed and that the preacher himself knows it.
Given her tendency to emphasize coloristic sonorities, the dance under Stutzmann dissolves into atmosphere rather than architecture or drama. The “Scherzo” becomes less a grotesque caricature than a landscape of shifting moods, and the movement’s strange world becomes almost hallucinatory. That would be fine except much of the balance was off in this concert; all too often (e.g. measures 11 through 75), the undulating fluid figures we should have been hearing were overshadowed by the “oom-pah” accompaniment. Even in Stutzmann’s approach, one should at least hear the circulating eddies and currents rather than the machinery.
All of which is perhaps why the “Scherzo” fascinates conductors so much. The first movement asks great metaphysical questions, and the finale offers glorious answers.
But the all-important “Scherzo” occupies that uncomfortable territory in between—the place where one suspects that people, institutions, nations (and perhaps even orchestras) are destined to repeat themselves endlessly.
It was only in the work’s final stages that we heard the two vocal soloists. Traditionally, vocal soloists occupy positions on the apron adjacent to the conductor, where they can establish both acoustic and visual contact with the audience. Here, however, they were relegated behind the second violins and violas, repeating a staging choice that has become something of a bad habit for Stutzmann and one that, once again, worked to the singers’ disadvantage.
Nevertheless, soprano Talise Trevigne and mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb brought both local resonance and international pedigree to Mahler’s vast canvas. Though they appear only in the symphony’s latter stages, each left a distinct impression, their contrasting vocal colors serving Mahler’s vision of spiritual awakening and transcendence.
Trevigne is a familiar and admired figure in Atlanta musical life. Audiences know her best through The Atlanta Opera, where she has portrayed roles ranging from Nedda in Pagliacci to Bess in Porgy and Bess, the latter of which was abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now on the faculty of Georgia State University’s School of Music, she maintains a significant presence in the region while pursuing an international career. Returning to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where she appeared during Stutzmann’s inaugural season, Trevigne brought her bright lyric soprano to Mahler’s finale with characteristic clarity and poise, the voice retaining its appealing blend of warmth and brilliance while projecting radiance without forcing the tone.
Chaieb, making her Atlanta Symphony debut after a memorable Cherubino in The Atlanta Opera’s Le nozze di Figaro, arrived with an impressive international résumé and is already scheduled to return to Atlanta in the title role of Carmen. Mahler entrusted the symphony’s emotional turning point to the mezzo soloist in “Urlicht,” and Chaieb responded with a richly colored, dark-hued voice and finely sustained legato that gave the movement an intimate, almost confessional quality. She brought quiet authority to Mahler’s plea for redemption, and in the finale her velvety mezzo blended beautifully with Trevigne’s luminous soprano, the two voices contributing warmth, radiance, and genuine spiritual conviction.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, prepared by director of choruses Norman Mackenzie, did a fine job, rising from initial mysterious murmurs to powerful exultations. The members of the orchestra, expanded for this occasion, applied their excellent skills well, given the circumstances of Stutzmann’s interpretative approach.
Honestly, though, it was not the most compelling Mahler Second I have heard. A more purely coloristic, atmospheric approach may well appeal emotionally to listeners less familiar with the work. Mahler’s score, however, rewards—and indeed requires—greater attention to dramatic architecture and clarity of detail than it was afforded on this occasion. When those elements are present, the symphony becomes revelatory, and a far more powerful statement with which to close a season. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- Nathalie Stutzmann: nathaliestutzmann.com
- Talise Trevigne: aso.org
- Rihab Chaieb: liceubarcelona.cat
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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