The choir was a mere 120 singers. The boychoir a minuscule 40. And Carnegie Hall’s electric abomination of an “organ” should be put out of its misery (three simple words on this matter for Carnegie Hall’s management and donors: Marshall and Ogletree). But what a Mahler Eighth. Pierre Boulez…

led the above forces plus eight soloists and the Staatskapelle Berlin in a performance that framed the work as much in Mahler’s symphonic canon as in the tradition of the oratorios of Bach and Mendelssohn, with a grandeur, drama, and a real feeling of occasion unique in Mahler’s works. Boulez’s incomparable control over dynamics and balances made a strong case that anything more than the nearly 300 musicians deployed on the stage (plus the brass ensemble deployed in the dress circle and the ethereal “Mater Gloriosa” Sylvia Schwartz singing fourteen of the most beautiful and thrilling words in Western music) five floors above the stage in the rear balcony) might be a bit too much of a good thing.

I’ve seen my share of Mahler Eighths, but none that even come anywhere close to this one for “high goosebump quotient” moments. I would ascribe that not only to the fine musicians playing the work but to Boulez, who was less restrained with his conducting than I have ever seen him on the podium – and certainly not only when he was conducting the amazing Westminster Concert Choir and American Boychoir; a few minutes into a ten-minute ovation, conductor Sybille Werner told me with more than a bit of delight and surprise in her voice that Boulez was so physically engaged in the music, certainly as much as the members of the orchestra.The work seemed to connect with a few people I know who subscribed to the entire series but were never sold on the Eighth. On the way out of the hall, I ran into a British friend who usually covers concerts on the continent who made this interesting comment: “That sonority! The Staatskapelle Berlin now sounds more like the Berlin Philharmonic than the Berlin Philharmonic these days.” That was the second person I heard say something along those lines this week.

As I noted in a previous post,  my blogging is likely to be on the light side for the next couple of weeks due to the intrusion of extrablogospheric events, and it’s not likely that I will be attending the final two concerts in the series featuring Das Lied von der Erde and Symphony No.9, but I will be posting review links from ClassicalSource.com as they post their reviews.