Music director George Hanson will end his 19-year career with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra this weekend performing a work he had hope to do with the ensemble a decade ago.
For the first time in the orchestra’s 90-year history, it will perform Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 3, a piece that involves a 40-voice strong female choir, 20 vocalists with the Tucson Arizona Boys Choir, a guest soloist and 20 extra instrumentalists to complement the orchestra’s full 85-piece contingent.
To call it a major undertaking understates how enormous this will be. Orchestra officials would not disclose the production costs, which include paying additional musicians, the choir and the soloist. The money was raised largely through private gifts from a handful of loyal TSO supporters, said Terry Marshall, the TSO’s associate director of marketing and public relations.
But as Hanson noted, “There is no inexpensive way to do Mahler Three at a professional level. It is one of those works that isn’t grandiose for its own sake. Its scale is enormous because its artistic goals are to describe something truly enormous: The creation of the universe and ultimately the meaning of life being found through love.”
Hanson had planned to mount the Mahler in the 2005-06 season. It was scheduled for April 2006 and included in the orchestra’s glossy season brochure released in March 2005. But six weeks after announcing it, the orchestra pulled back on the season, nixing the Mahler along with nine other major works throughout the season in an effort to save $60,000 in anticipated expenses. That also was the year of across-the-board pay cuts that spared no one; management and musicians lost wages.
Hanson last performed the Mahler a dozen years ago with his orchestra in Wuppertal, Germany. It has never been mounted in Tucson.
“I feel this is one of the greatest works of art ever created and Tucson should experience it,” Hanson said. “Once people experience it they will wonder why they’ve never heard it before.”
Mahler’s symphony is the largest symphony in the repertoire, clocking in at 90 to 100 minutes; Hanson estimated it would run 90 minutes with the TSO with no intermission.
