Season Opening

Return
The Gürzenich Orchestra is back from its summer break - kicking off this colorful and varied season with a large-scale work: in the length of a feature film, Gustav Mahler takes us through worlds of sound and emotion, out of the gloomy darkness and into the radiant light. Cheerful idylls and bizarre abysses included. Whether dance of death or cheerful exuberance, biting humor, apocalypse or redemption - he composes his symphonies as emotional tightrope walks with somnambulistic certainty. Two vocal soloists and a mixed choir are provided for the monumental Second Symphony. Together with the renowned singers Siobhan Stagg and Claudia Mahnke and the powerful-voiced Cologne Citizens' Choir, the Gürzenich Orchestra celebrates its deep connection with Gustav Mahler's music. A music in which we walk through the fullness of human life with all its longings and despair, joys and confusion, with its abrupt changes of mood. "Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all just a big, terrible joke?" Thus Gustav Mahler on the existential questions he addresses in his 2nd Symphony.