Symphony of a Thousand

On Tuesday, we went to listen to Mahler's Eighth Symphony, more commonly known as the "Symphony of a Thousand."

The story is that Mahler originally wrote this symphony for a thousand people to perform it, but it was only done once with a thousand people on the night of its premiere in 1910, Munich.

The one we went to was "only" four hundred people on stage; one orchestra (which had two harps, so imagine the size) and three choirs, plus the soloists standing at the front and some part of the brass section in one of the aisles between the seats of the audience because they couldn't fit on the stage.

Still, it was no different than a quartet who's been together for twenty years playing their favorite piece; everything was right, and even in that chaos and in that heap of people, instruments and stands, nothing stood out and everyone managed to listen to each other.

Of course, the conductor played a big part in all of this "staying together" and synchronization.

But the most important thing to do when you're performing with an orchestra, especially with a 300-people one, is to listen to every single instrument and voice. Looking at the director, in my opinion, comes later.

The most amazing thing I observed at one point midst the screeching dissonances, chromatic notes and "themes" to be heard once and never again, was how the huge violin section could pull off such an awesome crescendo; it sounded like one person was playing the whole thing. Playing the right notes and the rhythms is something, but doing a perfect crescendo in unison is another.

The Symphony of a Thousand by Mahler, put together by the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra and three choirs, was surely an amazing experience, one that I would be terribly sorry to miss. Once again, I realized how actually listening to people make the music there and then, with little flukes and perfect nuances is much, much, much more different than downloading the piece from torrents.com and listening to it with cheap headphones.