Mahler’s 9th in Görlitz: great things happened

„For the beginning of the new concert season, the audience in the Görlitz theatre clearly sensed that something special was going to happen: something supernatural instead of pleasant orchestral optimism. At the end, the applause began gradually and then grew and grew. Music Director Ewa Strusińska challenged her Neue Lausitzer Philharmonie  – and herself  – in one of the key works of music history and made great things happen.

Strusińska saw to it that the musical flow, right from the first movement on, would not be smooth[…]. Arches of tension, charged with energy, stopped and collapsed, as if Death itself had made its presence known. In the Rondo movement, the brass glowed and blinded in its fierce light, and the Adagio finale already began to shine in. The conductor opened this long movement in all of its breadth, with great calm and at the same time with the greatest intensity, making fragility itself audible. The vast harmonics, pushed to their extremities, had a direct emotional and liberating impact. Utter silence followed the last sounds“.

Karsten Blüthgen, Sächsische Zeitung, Sept. 12, 2019