Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor "Resurrection" (Live)

“I was awe-struck,” Kahchun Wong, the principal conductor of the Hallé, tells Apple Music Classical about his first encounter with Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. “It felt both foreign and familiar. Foreign, because I grew up in Singapore surrounded by Chinese, Malay and Indian folk traditions, worlds apart from late-Romantic Vienna. Yet it was familiar in its human essence.” Wong rates the work as one of the great pinnacles of the classical repertoire: “For me, ‘Resurrection’ stands alongside Beethoven’s Ninth and Wagner’s Ring cycle. After this work, the symphony was never quite the same again. It ceases to be a formal vessel and becomes an inner odyssey: a journey through life, death and transcendence. Its importance lies in the way Mahler expands, enriches and humanises the very form of the symphony.” In conducting and recording this mighty symphony with the Hallé, Wong was well aware of that legendary orchestra’s long-standing history with Mahler’s music. “The Hallé’s Mahler tradition runs deep, and especially associated with Sir John Barbirolli, followed by a long and distinguished lineage of interpreters who have shaped the orchestra’s sound and emotional vocabulary. That history is very important to me, and I approached it with both reverence and curiosity. When we began rehearsals on Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’, it felt less like taking over a legacy than entering a living conversation.” Among the Hallé’s outstanding qualities, Wong cites “the teutonic warmth of the strings, burnished brass and winds, a percussion section that breathes, alongside the discipline and nobility of phrasing permeating through the entire orchestra. These musicians carry the DNA of the Barbirolli sound, the [Mark] Elder sound: that sense of inner dignity and restraint. My task was to open that soundworld just a little more toward transcendence and wonder, without losing its humanity.” Work with the Hallé musicians, Wong recalls, was truly collaborative: “They know Mahler deeply, yet they approached every rehearsal with openness and curiosity. That’s a rare and precious thing in an orchestra with such a strong tradition. In the end, I think our ‘Resurrection’ wasn’t about building something new on top of a legacy, but about rediscovering the very reasons that legacy exists—that sense of purpose, of shared humanity.” From his own cultural background, Wong also had his own particular perspective. “In Singapore and Southeast Asia,” he explains, “ideas of life and death are seen as cyclical rather than linear. In many Asian traditions, death is not a definitive ending but a transformation of energy, a return to nature. That worldview has always influenced how I hear Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’. The first movement’s funeral march isn’t just tragedy; it’s part of a greater continuum, an elemental process of renewal.” And then there was an invaluable insight he gained from a friend diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease: “I remember having a conversation with him on what resurrection would mean to him. After a long silence, he quietly said, ‘It’s not about rising up to heaven, but about learning to live again’. That line stayed with me.” This gave Wong a particular perspective on Mahler’s “Resurrection”: “To me, the great chorales would have to sound less triumphant but more compassionate. The string tremolos became like breathing. The music’s emotional architecture has to unfold without exaggeration, to allow the listener to feel the transformation organically.” Mahler was notoriously meticulous in his directions in his scores, yet Wong acknowledges that “the deeper meaning lies beyond what is written. The score can tell you how long to wait, but not why to wait.” In searching for the “why”,Wong pursued an activity Mahler would have approved of: “I take long walks, sometimes along the Shonan sea in Japan, sometimes through the Peak District. I listen to the wind, the rhythm of footsteps, the sound of the world breathing. In those moments, the piece starts to speak differently: less about perfection, more about purpose. “And studying Mahler’s piano rolls, I found not mechanical accuracy, but humanity. His rubato was not indulgent, it was alive, almost as it was full of imperfection. He treated time as something flexible, breathing. I realised that to conduct Mahler is to let time flow through you, not to control it.” For Wong, the Symphony’s key moment comes in the fifth and final movement: “The silence before the choir enters in the last movement. That stillness, just after the last great storm of sound, feels like the breath between life and what comes after. It is a breath suspended between cataclysm and renewal. A world between worlds, shaped by the distant herald fanfares and the midnight bird calls, before the choir begins its soft, glowing ‘Aufersteh’n’. “It is not the triumph that moves me most, but the suspension, the moment when the orchestra has given everything, and the world holds its breath. In that pause, something sacred happens. You feel the air change. You feel every heart in the hall align, waiting for what is not yet known. “When the chorus finally enters, ‘Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du’, it is not victory; it is recognition. As if all the human struggle, all the searching and doubt, are met with quiet acceptance. That is resurrection: not a fanfare, but a return to stillness, to light.”