Speaking of student orchestras, here's one even younger than a student orchestra. The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, under Ben Zander, who may be the greatest youth orchestra conductor of all time, and that is surely a designation of great distinction. This is, quite simply, stunning, better than so much highly praised Mahler, alert to hundreds, even thousands of details that pass by so many professional Mahlerians. It contains the all-important glow of inward spirit without which music has little to no meaning, a performance as alert to the forces of life as the forces of music. In this music, played by youth and guided by a senior citizen, we hear Mahler the seer, the visionary whose music seemed foretell so much which soon occurred. This is the Resurrection as it should always be played - a prophecy of death and life, war and peace, forgiveness in the face of unforgivable sins. It does nothing less than remind you of what it truly means to live in the world, and it reminds you that the Resurrection Symphony is more than just a shallow piece of bombast, but truly one of the great total musical visions that take the entire community of musical instruments to reach for all things of the heavens and the earth - journeying through all spheres of life with Beethoven's 9th and Missa Solemnis, Monteverdi Vespers, Bach's B-Minor Mass and Passions, Wagner's Ring, Berliioz's Troyens, Mendelssohn's Elijah, Schumann's Paradise and Peri, Hindemith's Harmonies of the World, Nielsen's Saul and David, Janacek's Glagolitic Mass and Cunning Little Vixen, Dvorak's Saint-Ludmilla, Langgaard's Music of the Spheres and Antikrist, Golijov's St. Mark Passion, Tan Dun's The Map, James MacMillan's St. John Passion, Penderecki's St. Luke Passion and Seven Gates of Jerusalem and Utrenja, Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Berio's Sinfonia, Schnittke's First Symphony and History of Faust, Haydn's Creation and Seasons, Messiaen's La Transfiguration and Saint-François, so very many by Handel and Schütz, and to say nothing of Mahler's symphony that immediately followed this one....
And insofar as this performance has mistakes (like when the percussionist drops his sticks just after the first movement climax) they're, for once, mistakes of enthusiasm, not mistakes of distraction or incompetence. I will come back to Ben Zander and do a fuller profile, a conductor whose music making means so much more than so many highly praised jet setting professionals, but for the moment: THIS... IS... MUSIC!!!!
....I promised myself I wouldn't make another list....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvFohoThHE
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