Among the events is a special free concert by conductor Alan Gilbert (a client of my company) and the New York Philharmonic of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, which bears the subtitle “Resurrection.” Alan and the orchestra will perform this iconic symphony at Avery Fisher Hall on Saturday, September 10; it will also be simulcast onto a big screen on the Lincoln Center Plaza and broadcast on radio and television that night and on the evening of Sunday, September 11. Information about obtaining tickets for the concert is available here.

Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony was first performed in 1895. The inspiration for the work came from music that Mahler heard at the funeral of Hans von Bülow, a conductor he revered. It’s a massive and utterly awe-inspiring work, which begins with an often-terrifying funeral march and ends, more than 80 minutes later, with a blazing choral hymn celebrating the ultimate rebirth of the spirit. The adjective “life-changing” is overused to describe many things, but Mahler’s Second genuinely has that kind of transformative power. Some fans of the symphony have a religious, almost cultish devotion to it. For many orchestras and conductors, it is a musical Everest, a benchmark, and a go-to piece for momentous occasions. It is simply one of the greatest works of art ever created, and it is exactly the music that we need to listen to right now.

A decade of war, and now more than two years of extreme economic hardship — much of it caused by wanton greed — has left America with a profound hope deficit. Approaching 50 years old now, I look back and realize that a full decade of my life has been lived deep in the shadow of 9/11. My memories of that terrible day are still painfully vivid, but my desire for the country to move beyond fear and sadness, and fully into the light of hope and renewed possibility, is very real and very intense. Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony can help us.

For all its titanic reach, dramatic force and visceral power, Mahler’s “Resurrection” has some unforgettable moments of repose that provide great salve for the ravaged soul. My favorite is the fourth movement, “Urlicht” (“Primeval Light”) — a tender song of innocence sung by the mezzo-soprano. Here’s one of the greats, Janet Baker, singing it with Leonard Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra:

You don’t need to be a religious person to be overtaken by the sincerity and sweetness of this music. “Man lies in greatest need! Man lies in greatest pain!” she sings at the beginning. Look around us: that’s the world we live in, partly because of our inherent frailty as mortals, but also because so many of us have acquiesced to the pain and need around us, victims, as we often are, of our own self-absorption. But Mahler’s “Urlicht” takes us beyond all of this, beyond blame and worry, and squarely onto the road of redemption. “I am from God and shall return to God!” she sings. And, for me, these simple words are cause for enduring hope.

The New York Philharmonic has called its September 10 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, “A Concert for New York for the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 — In Remembrance and Renewal.” Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony suits this occasion perfectly, and I hope that the work’s message of rebirth and transcendence will resonate long after the occasion for which it has been programmed.

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post.

What I saw from then on is perfectly etched in my memory from a strange mix of real-time viewing off our fire escape and what was being broadcast live on television.   I watched the first tower go down with my own eyes, the second one on television.    It was the most horrific day for the city of New York in history and a tragedy that was felt profoundly around the world.

As a music lover, I always turn to music for inspiration about life events of every form and magnitude.   I believe that music can wash away the petty dramas of life so that we can get a better glimpse and understanding of the grand drama.

The evocation of human emotion through music plays an enormous part of this experience.  Personally, I have found the music of Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich to be incredibly accurate in the depiction of emotions.  So much so that I often feel that I am actually feeling the emotions they felt when they were composing the music.   I also find that the great American composer John Adams follows in this line.  The more I listen to his large-scale works (such as Harmonielehre, Doctor Atomic—both the opera and the symphony, etc.), the more I am amazed by his ability to convey feelings of very complex emotion.

And so this morning, thinking about 9/11, I chose to revisit the work that Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write to commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9/11:   On the Transmigration of Souls.

I will not even attempt to describe this work, a grand mix of orchestral, choral and taped sound and voice, but will admit that after listening to it I feel much more at ease with my emotional memory of the tragedy.

With  mournful trumpet solos, Adams makes reference to Charles Ives’s iconic work The Unanswered Question.   There are many unanswered questions in regard to the 9/11 tragedy.  But while listening to On the Transmigration of Souls, I felt the one that Adams asks in this work is:  how in a world so suffused with love, could something like this happen at all?

I was walking around the hills behind the Stanford University campus at sunset, listening to the piece on my Sony Walkman, and when the huge, glowing chords that bring the work to a close stopped ringing in my ears I was completely overwhelmed with a sense of love and spiritual joy.  For the next few days I listened to parts of it again and tried to learn more about it.  Then I had the crazy idea of having a huge party at the house I was living in off campus and inviting everyone I knew to hear it.  I was getting ready to graduate and move back to New York City, so I figured it might make for a strange and wonderful way to end my time in college.

There were probably 75 friends at the house that I shared with four roommates in nearby Los Altos when I announced that we should all crowd into the living room and listen to Mahler’s Third Symphony.  No one — including me — really knew who Mahler was, but to my astonishment everyone was silent for the entire time the Vienna Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado were making that magnificent noise on our stereo.  The room was dark except for one lamp, and people were scattered on the couches and chairs and floor, many holding and hugging each other, some making out, more than a few a little drunk.  But when it was over people were clapping like we had been in a concert hall.  We had all had a collective religious experience.  And for all intents and purposes, the Ecstatic Living Room was born.

Here is a clip of the great Leonard Bernstein leading the Vienna Philharmonic in the first movement:

A year later, I was back in New York City without a clue what I wanted to do with my life.  As the first day of summer approached, I thought nostalgically about that party a year ago. So I took out my Mahler 3 recording and listened to it while looking out over the Hudson River from the 18th floor apartment I was living in with my brother.  Once again, when the huge finale, which Mahler meant to depict the love that God had for his creation, came to an end, I felt utterly transformed.  From that time on I marked the first day of summer by listening to Mahler’s Third.  I look forward to it like kids look forward to Christmas morning.  It’s my special day of reflection and inspiration and renewal.

Mahler originally called this vast six-movement work “A Summer Morning Dream,” and his program for the long first movement once featured the heading, “Pan Awakes – Summer Marches In.”  But even if you didn’t know this, you might think of this as a summery kind of piece.  It’s big and bold and intense, like a hot summer day, when nature is literally exploding with life all around you.

The idea behind the symphony is simple but monumental: Mahler wanted to depict nothing less than the entirety of evolution, from inanimate nature (movement 1) to, five movements later, the consciousness of God’s all-encompassing love.  To achieve his ends Mahler stayed close to his key idea that a symphony should embrace everything that the world had to offer — life in all its paradox, beauty and contradiction.  It has huge climaxes as well as intimate and incredibly tender moments;  it has military marches and sublime hymn-like melodies; it has moments radiant with hope and other moments of primordial terror.

On the last pages of the score, Mahler told the musicians that the playing should be “saturated with feeling.”  For me, this is the point where I have not failed to cry each and every time I’ve heard the piece.

Monday, June 21 is the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, so why not take the opportunity on that day — or anytime this summer — to discover Mahler’s Third Symphony.  One of several great recordings of the work is a Philips disc from 1988 with Bernard Haitink leading the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which is available for download on iTunes.  Listen alone, or with a friend, or with a houseful of people.  It may just blow your mind; it might even change your life.

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Here is one of the tracks from the album, titled “Air Pour Les Guerriers”:

I sensed the bit of jest in Albert’s question, because perhaps the idea of us two guys listening to harpsichord music to unwind might seem a bit, well, fey.   Not that we have anything against fey, of course, but more because we had had a long history of unwinding with drinks to classical music.   In fact, the idea of the Ecstatic Living Room was launched, right where we were sitting, in Albert’s living room, many years ago where we would convene regularly to relax and explore music….though typically more muscular stuff.    We spent hundreds of hours listening to classical music, but in our 20s and 30s we seemed to gravitate to the music of Shostakovich, Beethoven, Mahler and new music that had, at least for me, supplanted much of the rock music I had been listening to.

Buy on Amazon
Buy on iTunes

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As is evidenced above, seasonal words sometimes sneak into the titles of certain works, but those aren’t the only works I connect with particular seasons. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony doesn’t have a seasonal subtitle or a nickname, but for me it’s definitely summer music, the slow movement passing like high clouds against a bright blue sky as you gaze at them from a hammock. Ravel’s Dapnhis and Chloe ballet is summer muic for me as well, conjuring up sunlit Greek Isles and brilliant white-sand beaches. On the other hand, Sibelius’s seven symphonies are mostly winter fare for me: I’m sure Finland (the composer’s homeland) has perfectly beautiful summers, but for me much of his music has a bracing, wintry quality that’s both awesome and imposing.

Spring is a rich time for musical associations. In churches and concert halls around the world throngs are performing and listening to Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s epic Passions in celebration of Easter season. But there’s also plenty of other, “non-religious” music that conjures up spring, both as natural phenomenon and as a symbol of hope and renewed vitality. I haven’t done a count, but it seems like spring finds its way into more titles of works than any of the other seasons: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; Beethoven’s Spring sonata for violin and piano; Schumann’s Spring Symphony (his first); Copland’s Appalachian Spring; Britten’s Spring Symphony; Richard Strauss’s Voices of Spring; and Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring; the “Spring” concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to name but a few examples that come to mind. But there are also other works without the seasonal word in their titles that seem to have Spring written all over them, like Mahler’s First Symphony.

So as winter finally loosens its grip in the Northern Hemisphere and you get ready for your own springtime rituals – from taking out that baseball mitt or tennis racquet to planting your garden – here’s a list of five of my favorite works for spring listening.

1. Igor Stravinsky: Rite of Spring. So you’ve felt cooped up all winter and really want to let loose? Start with Stravinsky’s most famous (and riot-inducing) ballet. Stravinsky used the phrase “Pictures from Pagan Russia” in a subtitle, a reference to the work’s story line, which ends in nothing less than human sacrifice (oh, that!). In conductor Valery Gergiev’s version with the Kirov Orchestra you can feel previously sleeping life bursting through the long-frozen Russian earth with savage force.  Buy on iTunes

Here’s a video clip of Mo. Gergiev conducting the first part of the Rite of Spring:

2. Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring. Compared to Stravinsky’s ballet, Copland’s spring celebration is a much more civilized affair, as 19^th century pioneers celebrate the raising of a new farmhouse. But the innocence and joy of the new season light up every bar of the work, and the famous hymn-like melody in the finale, from the Shaker tune “Tis a Gift to Be Simple,” leaves a lump in your throat as it builds to a noble climax. Bernstein’s recording with the Los Angeles Philharmonic is as authentic as it gets. Buy on iTunes

3. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1. The quiet, shimmering strings that open this symphony conjure up the awakening of spring like no other work. Repeated cuckoo calls and brass fanfare from afar confirm that the new season is here to stay, beginning a romantic adventure that includes young love, a broken heart and, in the final movement, a triumph of renewed hope. There are many wonderful recorded performances of this symphony to choose from. Leonard Bernstein recorded it twice, in the 1960’s with the New York Philharmonic, and three decades later with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw. Both are classics.

Buy Bernstein’s recording with the New York Phil on iTunes
Buy Bernstein’s recording with the Royal Concertgebouw on iTunes

4. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2, Resurrection. Despite the subtitle, this work features song lyrics that are taken from romantic poetry and not the New Testament of the Bible. In ways, the symphony continues the epic story that began with Mahler’s previous symphony. It’s a huge, sprawling work that is by turns terrifying and awe-inspiring as it charts the journey of the human soul from death to its reunion with the eternal spirit. If you’ve had a particularly rough winter, this work will lift your spirits like few others. Simon Rattle’s performance with the City of Birmingham Orchestra won a Gramophone Award and is justifiably famous.  Buy on iTunes

5. Schumann: Symphony No. 1, Spring. Bright brass fanfares and boisterous timpani strokes give the first movement a jolt of joyous energy that lights up the whole symphony. From the blazing opening to the giddy spirits in the finale, Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic have plenty of fun and make the music dazzle. Buy on iTunes