Finishing With A Flurry Symphony Finale Will Feature Kirkman, Swensen

More than 200 performers will crowd the Opera House stage Friday when the Spokane Symphony concludes its 1999-2000 season with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2.

Conductor Fabio Mechetti continues the season-ending Mahler cycle he began in 1997 with the Symphony No. 3 and continued in 1999 with Symphony No. 1.

“Almost all of Mahler’s symphonies are celebratory,” Mechetti says. “When you play them at the end of a season, they leave you with a sense of accomplishment. That goes both for the musicians and for the audience.”

Mahler’s Second Symphony will be the only work on Friday’s program, and it will be performed without intermission. The orchestra will be joined by soprano soloist Cynthia Kirkman, alto soloist Allison Swensen and the Symphony Chorale.

Kirkman, who performed earlier this season with the Spokane String Quartet, grew up in Spokane. She began her professional career singing with the Spokane Opera and now lives in New York, where she is in her third season as a resident artist of the Dicapo Opera Theater.

Swensen is a member of the voice faculty at Willamette University in Salem, Ore. She has performed in Carnegie Hall, at the Aspen Festival and with opera companies in New York, Oregon, Washington and California.

In addition to the soloists and the chorale, Mahler’s work requires a huge orchestra _ quadruple winds, 10 horns, eight trumpets, two harps, organ, a large battery of percussion and an enlarged string section.

“The parts are not outrageously difficult in themselves,” Mechetti says, “but the players are playing all the time. It requires great endurance and stamina.”

Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 _ often referred to by its nickname, “The Resurrection” _ was a product both of one of the composer’s early love affairs and his conversion to Christianity.

He was not a handsome man by conventional standards, but Mahler attracted beautiful women. One was Marion Mathilde von Weber, wife of Baron Carl von Weber, the grandson of the composer Carl Maria von Weber. The baron had interested Mahler in completing his grandfather’s unfinished opera “Die Drei Pintos.” As the saying goes, one thing led to another.

Baroness Weber and Mahler even planned to run away together. Mahler waited vainly for her to join him at the train station in Leipzig for their escape.

“He returned home, probably with some sense of relief at having avoided _ through no merit of his own _ a personal and professional abyss,” says historian and critic Steven Ledbetter.

None of this would matter to anyone other than Mahler and the baroness were it not for the fact that Mahler worked out the resulting emotional trauma in two of his greatest works, his first and second symphonies. Symphony No. 1 was created in a burst of energy in early 1888. Symphony No. 2 took another six years to complete.

The first movement Mahler described as a “Funeral Rite,” but he did not know quite how to follow it up. He wrote two additional movements in 1893. The two final movements followed a year later.

“During the time he was working on it,” Mechetti says, “he discovered in the mysticism of Christianity a spiritual comfort and he used that in the best possible way in this symphony. But it is like Beethoven’s Ninth in that it is not particularly Catholic or anything else, it is just a celebration of the highest manifestations of the human spirit.”

Father Bernard Coughlin, former president of Gonzaga University, will discuss Mahler’s Second Symphony as a part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the Opera House auditorium at 7.

This sidebar appeared with the story: IN CONCERT Spokane Symphony Friday, 8 p.m., at the Opera House. Tickets: $14 to $33 at the symphony ticket office (624-1200) and G&B outlets (325-SEAT or 1-800-325-SEAT).