Tulsa Symphony Orchestra: Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
May 2, 2026
Gustav Mahler must have been a hoot at parties.
No cutesy art songs for him, no fluffy overtures or toe-tapping marches. No soothing nocturnes. No ballads. Mahler wrapped up the Romantic Era with gargantuan symphonies and soul-searching song cycles. His greatest hits include that old favorite Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) and Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth), which my music history textbook calls “German translations of pessimistic Chinese poems.”
Lest you think that I disapprove of end-times navel-gazing, I do not. I’m here for it. You don’t understand joy if you haven’t seen real sorrow. You appreciate today’s sunshine more if there were tornado sirens yesterday. All my favorite movies have kissing and dying. I love a novel where the heroine walks off into the surf at the end.
Musically, Mahler is my guy for that.
This Eeyore sensibility is also part of what drew me to my main squeeze and regular concert date, Mr. Tulsa. He ponders his own mortality while listening to Buck Owens. He thanks the pheasants he shoots for their sacrifice. He sheds a little tear at the end of every West Wing episode. My sunny personality needs these downer guys to keep me balanced.
Mahler’s second symphony, the Resurrection, was the sole piece on Saturday’s TSO concert: five movements clocking in at an hour and a half, no intermission, with over 100 orchestral musicians and the Tulsa Chorale, 90 strong. This is hard-core classical music, not for the faint of heart. From my mezzanine seats—my favorite place in the TPAC’s Chapman Hall, because the acoustics are great up there and you can visually take in the whole production at once—Mr. Tulsa and I had an epic experience of this late-19th-century masterpiece that digs deep, swings big, and holds nothing back.
Maestro James Bagwell, who will become the TSO’s principal conductor in the 2026-2027 season, absolutely crushed it, leading 200 musicians through the twists and turns of this weighty work. The Resurrection’s first movement, a funeral march on steroids, came through as somehow both delicate and powerful. The strings were clean and precise in their exposed opening roles, setting the stage for further evolution of those themes by the winds and brass. This stately and sombre episode prepared me for the lighter second movement, designed to help funeral-goers remember good times with the deceased.
The third movement captivated me with its serpentine dance-of-death feel, before mezzo-soprano soloist Teresa Bucholz broke my heart in the best way possible in the fourth movement. Even if you don’t understand the German lyrics, this movement’s peace and longing can make you feel that there is a beautiful mystery out there, something higher than what you can see. Soprano soloist Jana MacIntyre had the loveliest angelic voice, which complemented this movement’s calmness.
The fifth movement brings up every life-and-death question you ever had. In his score, Mahler instructs some instrumentalists to play from off-stage, lending an otherworldly feel to the work and heightening its sense of the beyond. This movement brought everything—hymns, military marches, thunderous tympany (three of them!), sweeping strings, flutes and piccolos trilling, crashing cymbals, vibrating brass—and then, after waiting patiently with excellent posture for an hour, the Tulsa Chorale rose to its feet and brought it all home.
This finale isn’t a Jesus-coming-out-of-the-clouds clichéd resurrection, nor some scary rapture scenario, and definitely not hellfire and brimstone. It’s a sensitive expression of wondering if there’s more. Mahler pronounces no judgments. He isn’t here to answer your big questions; he’s here to pose a few.
Over the course of this symphony, TSO brought the energy and vitality I’ve grown accustomed to, while the Tulsa Chorale and the soloists added warmth and humanity. Mahler may not have been the life of the party, but I’m glad he’s here, and I’m glad Tulsa had the chance to hear the Resurrection in such a full-throated performance. (And let me commend you, Tulsa audience, for saving your clapping for the end of the piece! I had braced myself for a goofy smattering of applause after every movement, which should be a holy moment of reflection and not an awkward inability to live with silence, but you thrilled me with your respectful and appropriate restraint.)
But why spend a hard-won evening out listening to 90 solid minutes of music about death and resurrection in the first place? You never know when what you absorb will come in clutch. A few weeks ago, I was suddenly offered the chance to meet some friends in Paris. I fretted around the house for a few days, mumbling how it wasn’t in my budget or my schedule, that it was unplanned. But I really wanted to go—come on, Paris in the springtime? I dithered until Mr. Tulsa put it in perspective: “Baby, we’re all going to die. Go to Paris,” he told me.
He was right. I’m going to Paris. When you make a little space to think about death—about what else is out there—it pushes you to live a little better.
