ATLANTA — Even before the funeral drama had been established, the opening violin-viola tremolos in Nathalie Stutzmann’s account of Mahler’s Second Symphony seethed with a fearsome intensity, as if the music were running for its life. The echo of Die Walküre’s Prelude, with its life-and-death urgency, was unmistakable: a crisis already in motion.
On June 6, Stutzmann led the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the second of three performances closing the orchestra’s season. She had previously turned to Mahler to open the orchestra’s 80th season in 2024 with the First Symphony. Such programming symbolism is hardly unusual — conductors often reach for the Mahler shelf when they want a sense of occasion — but the Resurrection clearly carried a more personal charge for the ASO’s music director as she rounded off her fourth season in Atlanta.
From the perspective of this out-of-town visitor, the audience also seemed unusually varied in age for a main-series concert, with a visible contingent of younger audience members. Atlanta Symphony Hall appeared well attended by enthusiastic Mahlerians — and, to judge from some of the reactions, aspiring ones encountering his music for the first time. The atmosphere suggested a willingness to give over to that experience, an eagerness that settled into rapt attention once the performance began.
Stutzmann’s reading of the Second was charged above all by a layered sense of anticipation: how terror gathers before the blow lands, how a crescendo earns its force, how consolation must wait until it can matter. The Resurrection theme, when it first appeared, sounded almost provisional — still earthbound, not yet released from the world — as if its radiance had to be won. Her European-style string layout — divided violins, with basses and harps to her left — sharpened the sense of Mahler’s textures answering across the stage and helped bring inner voices into relief.
The strings played with taut unanimity in the fastest, most agitated passages, while the ASO as a whole responded with impressive discipline and flexibility, moving from raw attack to suspended quiet with laser focus. Winds and brass gave Stutzmann’s highly shaped reading much of its character, from the English horn’s plaintive color in the first movement to the distant horn calls and burnished chorales of the finale.
That idea began to glimmer later, in a developmental stretch that opened into a pastoral clearing. Drawing on her background with Bach, Stutzmann molded Mahler’s chorale-like phrases with a sense of vocal direction and collective breath, foreshadowing the emergence of the human voice later in the work. The Wagnerian shadow also reappeared in changed form, as the English horn sounded a cousin of the Sleep motif amid a mirage-like calm.
But the allusions were less important than Stutzmann’s dramaturgy of tension and release. Her interpretive hand was never hidden. In a less persuasive performance, this degree of shaping might have felt over-determined. Here, though, the payoff was a performance in which transitions carried unusual dramatic weight and even the music between major events took on character.
Stutzmann brought an extraordinary dynamic range to bear: electrifying, full-tilt orchestral force at one extreme, sustained hushes at the other, so soft and concentrated that Mahler’s chamber-like textures became newly legible. Climaxes were prepared as dramatic processes, acquiring not just physical but emotional force. They hit all the harder because the quieter playing had been made so eventful.
The passage back from this clearing was just as carefully controlled. The movement’s catastrophic climax landed like a thunderstroke, spending nearly everything. But Stutzmann staged a fierce rebound: The low strings slipped forward with stealthy, panther-like menace, and the reprise pushed onward with a second wind.
The middle movements, too, became part of Stutzmann’s larger drama of anticipation and recollection. After the first movement, she left the podium and allowed a few minutes to pass before launching into an admirably differentiated Andante — less than the full, arguably unrealistic five-minute pause Mahler asks for, but enough to mark the threshold. She caught the music’s Schubertian charm while avoiding cloying nostalgia, repeatedly gesturing for more vibrato and emotional warmth as the strings leaned into their glissandos with feathery delicacy.
The Scherzo began with an emphatically violent jolt from the timpani, as if to shock us awake from this reverie. Stutzmann was especially effective in these transitions, where Mahler moves between high-decibel shock and intimate chamber detail. The movement had flow and swing as she coaxed individuality from the musicians, allowing the solo trumpet to appear as if from a distance, veiled and illusory. When the orchestra tore open in a cry of alarm, the earlier timpani figure was woven seamlessly into Mahler’s network of warning signals.
Long before Stutzmann conducted the Resurrection, she knew what it meant to wait through most of the symphony for the alto soloist’s entrance. In the decades preceding her turn to full-time conducting, she made her name as a contralto and recorded the pivotal alto solo in 2000 with Seiji Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra. During a session with critics attending the Music Critics Association of North America’s annual meeting, Stutzmann recalled sitting among the strings and feeling “all those vibrations of the music” enter her body so powerfully that she imagined herself one day conducting it.
This time, that entrance belonged to mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, whose “Urlicht” combined warmth and a dark bloom with an undercurrent of anxiety. Rather than float above the battle in serene innocence, she made the orchestral song feel touchingly vulnerable. Stutzmann provided a consoling counterpoint with the Bachian resonance she drew from the brass chorale commentary. In concertmaster David Coucheron’s phrasing, the angelic presence came across as a surreal apparition rather than a doorway to easy transcendence.
Stutzmann gave the finale’s opening eruptions their full force, but an operatic sense of event made the aftermath even more compelling: sudden withdrawals, distant horn calls, and the sense of a vast space opening beyond the visible orchestra. Not every passage was equally focused: The section following the first “Great Summons” to Judgment Day seemed to meander. But when the music burst open into its next great convulsion, Stutzmann made the apocalyptic stakes palpable without turning the passage into mere illustration. The ensuing march was wonderfully detailed, and the long, desolate flute solo hovered with eerie poise above the surrounding tumult. It was one of several moments when Stutzmann’s own highly personal reading was mirrored by the players’ freedom to search out the expressive edge of their lines.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, prepared by Norman Mackenzie, justified its lofty reputation. Its entrance, perfectly balanced sotto voce, was not merely beautiful but sustained at length, with remarkable discipline. From there, the buildup gathered force with a patience even Rossini could scarcely have imagined. Chaieb and soprano Talise Trevigne, positioned to Stutzmann’s right behind the violins, retained distinct individual timbres while locking into a single line of supplication.
Mahler’s own added text rejects orthodox reassurance but is not immune to sentimental inflation: “O believe! … You were not born in vain … I shall die, so as to live.” But Stutzmann kept it from registering as a glib, late-Romantic overlay on Klopstock’s folk-Christian hymn, making it feel instead like something hard-won by the vast collective onstage. With organ, bells, chorus, soloists, and the full complement of 10 horns, the final catharsis did not arrive ready-made. Stutzmann and the ASO compelled us to hear the struggle that made it possible.
