Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra first played Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection,” in 1982. In the 43 years since then, it is, I would guess, the piece Zander has programmed most often. He recorded it with the Philharmonia of London in 2012. He last did it with the BPO in 2017, and with the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in 2023.

Friday in Symphony Hall, Zander, now 86 but as energetic as ever on the podium, gave us what might be his final “Resurrection,” again in the company of Jamie Kirsch’s Chorus pro Musica. It was a memorable evening. Two of his principals, Peggy Pearson (oboe) and Kevin Owen (horn), played in that 1982 “Resurrection” and have been with the orchestra ever since. As in 2017, the concert took place on Good Friday. Zander had for his vocal soloists the pair from his recording, Swedish soprano Miah Persson and English mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly. And he had a special guest, Marina Mahler, the composer’s granddaughter. She spoke briefly by way of introduction, beginning, “There’s very little that I can say to you that the music will not say,” before thanking Zander and the orchestra for their devotion to her grandfather. The performance itself was transcendent, even better, if memory serves, than the one from 2017. (And for a while, at least, you can still enjoy it on YouTube HERE.)

The Second did not exactly emerge fully formed from Mahler’s head. What became the first movement started out as an 1888 tone poem titled Todtenfeier. What became the fourth movement started out as a song for alto and piano, “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”), that he wrote around 1892. In the summer of 1893, Mahler composed the second and third movements, but it wasn’t till 1894, when he heard a setting of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s “Die Auferstehung” at the funeral of Hans von Bülow, that he saw the finale as ending with his own setting of Klopstock’s poem. He conducted the symphony’s premiere in Berlin in 1895, to a mixed reception. Its redemptive certainty would give way to the pantheism of his Third Symphony, the mortal humor of the Fourth and Fifth, the mortal tragedy of the Sixth, the mundane humor of the Seventh, and the death struggles of Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth and Tenth. But Mahler never outgrew the hope of the “Resurrection.” It was the piece he conducted at his Vienna farewell concert, after he had resigned as director of the Vienna Hofoper. It was the first of his symphonies that he conducted in New York (1908), and the first that he conducted in Paris (1910).

You don’t need his program to understand that the opening Allegro maestoso is a funeral march, or that it’s the hero of his First Symphony who’s in the coffin. Wagner’s influence is also palpable. Right at the start, the sideways-and-downward slipping of the cellos and basses recalls the passage in Die Walküre where Hunding orders Sieglinde to prepare food and drink for Siegmund. And at the outset of the finale, after the initial cataclysm, the “Eternal” theme turns out to be a rhythmic variation on the “Ewig” motif from Siegfried: “Ewig war ich, ewig bin ich” (“Eternal I was, eternal I am”) is what Brünnhilde sings to Siegfried after he’s braved her ring of fire. Both the first movement and the finale are both as complex and original as anything Mahler would go on to write. It was Todtenfeier, when Mahler played it for him on the piano in 1891, that prompted Bülow to say the piece made Tristan sound like a Haydn symphony.

Zander’s stormy, organic reading of this opening movement would likely have pleased Mahler more than Bülow. The funeral march proper competes with a yearning second subject and then the fearful introduction of the plainchant “Dies irae.” (I wonder whether Mahler, who in 1888 was still in thrall to the Romantic novelist Jean Paul, didn’t have the Fürst’s funeral procession from that author’s Titan in mind.) Zander’s sharp rhythms buoyed the moderate tempo, and he kept the second subject on a tight rein before easing into the exposition’s coda, Pearson’s oboe hanging in the air. The development, where that second subject got room to emote, brought seamless transitions, Zander changing speeds almost imperceptibly, plus a plangent cor anglais solo (Alessandro Cirafici), a solemn cor anglais–bass clarinet duet (Cirafici and Gary Gorczyca), and an exuberant flute solo (Lisa Hennessy) when the second subject returned running.

Halfway through the movement, the opening outburst from the cellos and basses returns in what must be the start of the recapitulation. In fact, it’s the second part of the development. Zander played along with Mahler’s misdirection, but he left no doubt when the actual recapitulation, fff, arrived. Solo trumpet (Stephen Banzaert) underlined the moment when the second subject rises to an ethereal F-sharp, in anticipation of the finale. The violins banished such thoughts with their weary glissandos, and the movement moved, precisely at the composer’s tempo sostenuto, to its implacable close.

Mahler wanted a five-minute pause to follow the Allegro maestoso. Perhaps he thought his audience would need that much of a break to recover from the gravity of the first movement; perhaps he thought the Andante moderato would be jarring if it followed immediately. Nowadays, conductors usually pause for a few minutes. Zander left the podium and sat in a chair behind it, facing the orchestra, for three minutes, at the end of which Connolly entered and took her seat, no score in hand, no music stand in front of her. There was nothing remarkable in any of this, but Friday’s audience grew restive and seemed confused. I was surprised Zander didn’t take a moment to explain.

Mahler intended the Andante moderato as a flashback to a happy time in the hero’s life; his program described it as “a memory, a ray of sunlight, pure and cloudless.” One can play the movement as a minuet or a Ländler; Zander’s choice was a quick Ländler, light and fleeting, with a measured Viennese lilt. His cellos shone in their countermelody during the return of the A section; the return of the B section erupted, as if a field of flowers were being lashed by a storm. (So much for the movement’s being “cloudless”!) The pizzicato strings of the final section bespoke a lost innocence.  

Titled “In ruhig fließender Bewegung” (“In Peacefully Flowing Movement”), the third movement is Mahler’s remodeling of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn song “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt,” wherein St. Anthony, finding his church empty, goes to preach to the fishes, who listen attentively before resuming their venal ways. Mahler’s original timing thought was 10 minutes, but early interpreters like Oskar Fried and Otto Klemperer took the movement a bit slower, and Zander did so to good effect, making space for cheeky B-flat clarinet (Rane Moore), E-flat clarinet (Sangwon Lee), flute (Hennessy), and piccolo (Rachel Braude). The ruthe (essentially a bundle of birch twigs tapped on the bass drum) was palpable in the scherzo proper; the storm-tossed trio opened into a wondrous anticipation of the finale, Banzaert’s trumpet nostalgic, the sea seeming to give up her dead. Then the cry of despair, all the more despairing because Zander didn’t rush it, one last glimpse of C-major heaven, and finally the mindless fishes, as unaffected by St. Anthony’s sermon as Mahler’s critics were by his music.

“Urlicht” opened with a glowing “O Röschen rot” from Connolly, who stood and sang with disarming warmth and unaffectedness, attending to the text without overenunciating. She put me in mind of the penitent from the fifth movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Audible closing contrabassoon (Stephanie Busby) anchored the brass and wind chorale that followed “O Röschen rot”; Pearson and concertmaster Gregory Vitale contributed searing solos, and between them Zander and Connolly nailed Mahler’s dramatic molto ritenuto marking at the point where God’s light is given and the song must relax. The only puzzle here was the vacant chair next to Connolly, the one you’d have expected to see Persson sitting in.

Zander has described the finale of the “Resurrection” as a series of frescoes in a mediæval church, and he moved from one to the next with a sure sense of pacing. Mahler quotes the cry of despair from the scherzo before introducing the “Eternal” theme. “Der Rufer in der Wüste” (“A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”) brought plaintive triplets from Pearson; a fluent descending sequence from flute (Hennessy) to clarinet (Moore) to bassoon (Ronald Haroutunian) to contrabassoon (Busby); a “Dies irae” trio where Hennessy, Pearson, and Moore were so perfectly aligned, you’d have thought you were hearing a single instrument; and finally the voice of hope from trombone (Gregory Spiridopoulos) and trumpet (Banzaert). Cor anglais (Mia Fasanello) powered through the “Grief” theme (Mahler had Parsifal’s Amfortas in mind); a chorale intoning the “Dies irae” featured audible contrabassoon and tuba (Takatsugu Hagiwara). Then Zander opened the seventh seal and the “Aufersteh’n” theme emerged.

The dead must, however, first face Judgment. Here Zander turned the “Dies irae” into a raucous, lively F-major march, the dead optimistic until terror and grief (the latter intoned by Spiridopoulos) returned. A few taps on glockenspiel led to Mahler’s “Große Appell,” the offstage Last Trumpet effects perfectly judged, nightingale flute and piccolo representing the soul’s flight.

At this point Persson’s chair was still vacant. The choral “Aufersteh’n” was breathed rather than sung, and at its end she materialized at the left end of the sopranos, floating her “dich rief dir geben” over the top as radiantly as she did in 2012. Eventually she came forward and stood by Connolly, who greeted her as if she were a newly arrived angel, and they were nothing short of angelic in “O glaube” and their “O Schmerz” duet. CpM’s “Wieder aufzublüh’n” was soft and slow; “Was entstanden ist” burst forth before easing; the men managed a ff “Bereite dich” without barking; and “Sterben werd’ ich um zu leben,” at a breathtaking slow tempo, rose above the orchestra. The final “Aufersteh’n” was a song of triumph, bells ringing out in celebration. Everyone had reason to celebrate.  

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.