Fabio Luisi inaugurates the Rai Orchestra season with Mahler’s “Resurrection”

The grandiose Mahlerian page is highly significant for the recent history of the Rai Orchestra: it was in fact performed in January 2006 under the baton of Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos for the reopening of the Rai Auditorium in Turin after eight years of restoration.

In the following years it was revived in March 2014 by Juraj Valcuha and in January 2020 by James Conlon, both in those years the main directors of the team. Today the symphony, which involves more than 110 instrumentalists on stage, to which are added a chorus of 70 voices And two solo singers, is called to represent a return to the sumptuous normality of a large symphony orchestra like that of Rai, after the reduced-rank programming made necessary in recent years due to the pandemic. To interpret it, alongside Fabio Luisi – who holds prestigious positions at the Danish Radio Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo, and who during the Rai season will conduct five different concerts – are called the Chorus of the Teatro Regio in Turin directed by Andrea Secchi and the solo voices of the soprano Valentina Farcas and the alto Wiebke Lehmkuhl.

Composed between 1888 and 1894, when Mahler was director of the Budapest and Hamburg Opera Houses, the Second Symphony is the work that required the longest gestation time from its composer. It is a choral work of monumental proportions, begun by a boy of twenty-eight and finished six years later by a man of thirty-four, already quite successful. In fact, during the drafting of the Second Symphony, Mahler gradually approached the awareness of having reached the mature age, also thanks to his growing success as conductor, which gave him a completely new authority.