The concert was preceded by an excellent talk by Laura Stanfield Prichard. Her amazing knowledge of Mahler and of music in general opened my eyes and ears to be prepared to hear the first performance of this work I have ever heard. She compared Mahler's work to that of Verdi and of Charles Ives, both of whom were contemporaries of Mahler. Like Ives, Mahler used sound he had grown up with, band music, church music, and folk music in his compositions.
His Eighth Symphony is a massive, sometimes wandering work of enormous proportions. The original performance had a chorus of 800 singers and a huge orchestra. Last night's performance had to make do with a mere 300 singers and the enlarged Springfield Symphony Orchestra.
The excellent solo singers were Rachel Rosales, Kara Shay Thomson, Emily Misch, Sara Murphy, Mary Phillips, Jonathan Matthew Myers, Jesse Blumberg, and Adam Lau. The fine conductor, who managed to keep all these elements together with apparent ease, was Kent Tritle. The Connecticut Concert Children's Choir was conducted by Marc Singleton.
Kent TritleThe work took up the entire concert, the first half being based on the Latin hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus, and the second half of the last part of Goethe's Faust.
Throughout the work the orchestra and chorus are divided into multiple sections making it an incredibly busy work to listen to, indeed.
It made for an exhausting musical evening!
