QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane
Friday, August 24

Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra/Simone Young
with Anna Larsson ms, Hayoung Lee s, Brisbane Mahler Chorus

The Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra’s season inaugurating QPAC’s exclusive International Series captured the public imagination, and both Das Rheingold and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony earned extended standing ovations from sold-out crowds who’d travelled from all over Australia.

The choice of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony for the second night of the season couldn’t have been more apt. Most of the 90-minute work was composed while Mahler was in the very position of Music Director of the Hamburg Opera and Philharmonic that Simone Young holds today. And my god, doesn’t she do the position proud. In a performance of the Resurrection that at times generated terrifying orchestral power, Young demonstrated her natural affinity for the grand musical architecture of the late Romantic period.

With her immaculate stick technique and expressive left hand, she keeps the tension within the orchestra coiled up for minutes at a time, her pianissimi so tightly focussed and well blended in tone, but then she unleashes crescendi that rise and rise and rise until the ceiling is practically rattling.

This is dramatic, showpiece stuff, and ideally suited of course to Mahler’s most structurally problematic, but...