Or is it simply that triumph over adversity sells in today’s uncertain world? Whatever the reason, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has already received four major UK performances this year: a season finale for the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, a season opener for both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, and an 80th season celebratory concert for the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Next month the London City Orchestra perform it in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls.
On disc, the field of Mahler 2s is even more crowded. Apple Music Classical currently throws up 222 listings; Presto Music’s search engine returns 260 results, many of them complete recordings to download or buy on CD or vinyl (some of these, of course, are reissues of recognised classic accounts). Three new recordings of the symphony are out this month alone, which will bring the total released into the UK market to an astonishing nine over just 12 months.
The lineup of conductors is certainly impressive – including Kahchun Wong, Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Donald Runnicles and Paavo Järvi – but is it possible the market has reached saturation point? Or is it that we just can’t get enough of Mahler’s apocalyptic vision and the dopamine fix that accompanies the symphony’s choral finale? The statistics clearly speak for themselves: this year there have been nine Mahler 2s released.
By way of comparison, the 5th and the 8th symphonies received just four releases each in 2026; Mahler’s other symphonies even fewer. Mahler wasn’t always popular, of course. For all sorts of reasons, not least the Nazis’ aversion to the composer in general, his works were slow to enter the catalogue.
The Second was in fact the first Mahler symphony to be recorded in its entirety when Oskar Fried and a pared-back Berlin State Opera Orchestra committed it to wax cylinders during sessions in 1923 and 1924. Perhaps as few as 40 players were huddled around the acoustic horn, but Fried had been coached by the composer himself for a performance of the work in 1905, and, so, tinny as it sounds today, it carries the imprimatur of authenticity. It was over a decade later that Eugene Ormandy and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra made the work’s second recording, captured live in 1935, this time using electrical microphones.
Acoustically it was a major leap forward, and thanks to the conductor’s urgency – he’s 12 minutes faster than Fried – it still lands blows today. Sixteen years would pass before Otto Klemperer, who as a young man had known and worked with the composer, stepped into a studio with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1951. His visceral, though boxy sounding, account was followed in 1958 by Mahler’s protege Bruno Walter who recorded the work with the New York Philharmonic.
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