Theodor Adorno, irascible soothsayer of modern music, said that Gustav Mahler’s symphonies desired ‘to fill the empty flows of time with meaning, to transform it into a permanence full of joy’. Few works could be more exemplary of this impulse than Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the ‘Resurrection’, which calls on over 100 instrumentalists, two solo voices, and a huge chorus to chart its redemptive path over nearly 90 minutes.

On 14 September the piece concluded Bold Tendencies’ 2024 programme – the South London car park that has in recent seasons rung with music by Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, and Galina Ustvolskaya. As a member (and trustee) of the Philharmonia Chorus, I sang in the performance with the Philharmonia orchestra conducted by Nefeli Chadouli, who made her UK debut. It was a sell-out performance, with hundreds on the waiting list. What’s all the fuss about? Why, as they say in Educating Rita, would people just die without Mahler?

Like its radical forebears – Beethoven’s Ninth and Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique – the Resurrection Symphony is made from eccentric, heterogeneous elements. The opening movement was written originally as a symphonic poem titled Totenfeier; a 20-minute dead march that begins with lacerating strings and convulsive gestures from cellos and basses. The second movement is a Ländler, the Austrian country dance that often takes on a bittersweet, nostalgic quality in Mahler; a more striving theme intrudes on these memories of a happier life. A demotic scherzo follows – an expanded orchestration of one of Mahler’s songs, which sees a sloshed St Anthony of Padua preaching to the fishes, accompanied by a tottering, klezmer-ish clarinet. It collapses into a drunken heap.

From the ridiculous, a sublime mezzo soprano solo suddenly appears, singing of the Urlicht – the primal light, described in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, that redeems our earthly suffering. The song begins in D-flat major, one notch up from the C-minor chord that closes the scherzo; this elevated harmonic light creates the impression of a sudden miraculous opening, as symphony meets orchestral song, and the first of many human voices speaks out.

The roots of Mahler’s orchestral works are sunk deep into the fairy tales and dreams of the Wunderhorn. The folkloric anthology functions in Mahler’s music like an unconscious archive of primal archetypes and wishes, which are then worked out, disguised, repressed, and transformed in the more formal structures of his symphonic music, like a Freudian Traumarbeit or dreamwork (Mahler was once psychoanalysed by the man himself). The syncretic mix of song and symphony in Mahler Two reflects the rich interconnectedness of Mahler’s compositional imagination.

The use of offstage instruments is one of Mahler’s favourite bits of orchestral theatre; in the Sixth Symphony cowbells drift in from afar, a moment of celestial, bovine nostalgia from the next valley over. In the Resurrection Symphony brass and percussion – ‘The Great Call’ – summon the hushed voices of a mysterious choir from the beyond, in the cantata-like choral finale. In Bold Tendencies the kind of offstage effects Mahler experimented with are given a new spin by the rumble of trains and traffic and the hum of conversation from the Campari-slicked bar upstairs.

The chorus sings words by Freidrich Klopstock, to which Mahler adds his own epic exhortations – ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!’; I die so that I might live again. Orchestra, organ, and voices attest a triumphant hope. Though famous for its huge climaxes, there are moments of tender Viennese gemütlichkeit. The close harmony chorus of ‘Wieder aufzublüh’n wirst du gesät!’ – You were sown so that you might bloom again – is both world-weary and consolatory. ‘Imagine you are in some Heuriger in the hills around Vienna at 3am’, our chorus master Gavin Carr said in rehearsal: ‘You’ve gone through the last bottles of Grüner Veltliner and are now into the really rough stuff.’

A piece about transfiguration, the Second Symphony often serves as a symbolic punctuation point. In Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023), a performance of the work at Ely Cathedral expunges Leonard Bernstein’s inner demons – Cooper famously trained for months to get the conductor’s convulsions down to a tee. Simon Rattle opened Birmingham’s Symphony Hall with the piece and used it to say goodbye to the CBSO in 1998. Mahler himself bade farewell to Vienna with the symphony in 1907; it was also the work with which he introduced himself to the Viennese public as a composer in 1899.

The ‘resurrection’ of Mahler’s title obviously has a religious resonance – as does the God that the text invokes, the ‘Lord of the harvest’ who gathers up the dead. But its spirituality is mystical rather than dogmatic, reflecting Mahler’s intellectual and cultural idiosyncrasy as a provincial Jew living in fin-de-siecle Vienna who converted to Catholicism to ease his professional and social passage.

A key influence on Mahler was the speculative, animistic philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner. He imagined a life in three stages: prenatal, primordial darkness; a sociable existence in the light; and death, but one in which the soul is transfigured and raised to a higher plane, joining with an animate earth and cosmos. It’s an idea that maps roughly onto the symphony: grief sets the scene, before the second and third movements’ recollection of earthly life, surmounted by the finale’s exaltant, cosmic redemption. ‘O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube: Es geht dir nichts verloren!’ – Believe, my heart – nothing will be lost to you.

It’s a journey out of grief, whose humane urgency was articulated in an astonishing staging of the symphony by Romeo Castellucci at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2022. On the vast earth-covered stage of the formerly derelict Stadium de Vitrolles, a horse and his handler discover a body. UNWRA vans arrive and a mass grave is meticulously disinterred in real time, with bodies documented, bagged, and taken away for proper burial. At the end, sheets of rain fall and the turned soil is renewed.

The Second Symphony is part of Philharmonia Chorus history. They first performed it in 1963 with Otto Klemperer at the Royal Festival Hall, in the days when a Mahler symphony was a rare sighting on concert platforms. They have presented it over 40 times since, with legendary conductors including Rafael Kubelik, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, and Giuseppi Sinopli. It’s a hit with audiences, who love the spectacle, and conductors, too, who must relish the priced-in podium theatrics; not for nothing have Mahler’s symphonies been called – rather uncharitably – concertos for conductor and orchestra.

The Philharmonia Chorus’ characteristic sound has its roots in Mahler’s world. When the producer Walter Legge founded the chorus in 1957, he wanted it to have the sound of central European opera houses – penumbral, theatrical, rich, intense. Wilhelm Pitz, the first chorus master, and Norbert Balatsch, who took over in 1975, had both worked at the Vienna State Opera, where Mahler was music director. Klemperer, who worked with the chorus many times, conducted the offstage orchestra in the Resurrection Symphony for Mahler in 1905, subsequently finding support from the composer.

The 15 minutes the chorus sings are among the most intense and cathartic in the repertoire. This is partly because Mahler’s vocal writing is as all-embracing as his symphonies. He calls for some of the lowest notes achievable by human voices in the hushed opening –abyssal tones that create the impression of some ancient, depthless mystery behind a simple hymn. ‘Do not sing an octave higher!’, Mahler writes in the score, in case anyone is tempted to cheat. A few minutes later, these same basses will be stretched to the upper limit of their range; it is a piece that requires extremes of high and low and loud and soft, as well as emotional release.

That the first entry of the huge choral forces is barely audible is a coup de théâtre. The sound, made with half-closed mouths, should have no determinate point of origin for the public, like the imperceptible bass drum rolls that Mahler loves to use – musical microwave radiation on the fringes of the known sonic universe. At Bold Tendencies the choir were at the audience’s backs, slipping in quietly in the finale to surprise them with this mysterious, enveloping utterance.

The Chorus recorded the symphony in 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall. When we performed the piece my partner had just undergone major surgery and was convalescing. It was not unexpected and went well, but was still one of life’s frightening and exhausting experiences. At the end of the piece I felt an especially powerful sense of release, and relief, as the orchestral bells pealed.

At the time I recalled rehearsing a section a couple of years before. ‘Bereite dich zu leben!’, Mahler writes – ‘Prepare yourself for living.’ Its first statement, for male voices alone, is a defiant exhortation; the second sees the harmony twist and darken, the same words suddenly more trepidatious and imploring, before the soloist emerges, awestruck, from the texture. ‘These bars contain all of Mahler’, Gavin said. ‘All of the pain and suffering of living, its trials – and its promise.’