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.