Mahler Resurrected.

Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony (Resurrection) will be the exclamation point at the end of conductor Lorin Maazel's inaugural season at the New York Philharmonic, marking 95 years of New York conductors championing the work of the kingpin of romantic emotionalism. According to Mahler, "A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything." So it is with the 80-minute choral-orchestral monster known as the Resurrection.

Written by Mahler between the ages of 28 and 35, its unabashed lyricism inevitably harks back to the great Viennese masters, but Maazel knows well that this massive symphony-oratorio hybrid is more complex by far. Having conducted the first movement of the symphony for the first time at Tanglewood in 1952 (right about the time that audience members were beginning to think twice about walking out of Mahler performances), Maazel has had more than 50 years to stew with Mahler's emotional concepts.

"At concert time in Tanglewood, I related to the music's drama and motor drive," he writes. "It was only in later years that I felt the melancholy, the yearning, the resignation and his hope for a better world, a better fate. No one has ever stated that more convincingly than he did in the final movement of the Second Symphony. To this day, at every performance I conduct, I am thrilled to the bone as the music surges toward the final chorus, 'Ja! Auferstehen.' At that moment, 'Resurrection,' I believe also means, 'Humans! Rise above your self-inflicted horrors.' Would that we could find the courage to do so today."

So in many ways, Maazel is unashamedly proving true the complaints of old-time Mahler critics, who dismissed Mahler performances as a way for conductors to indulge their egos. But he is also taking his place in a long line of New York conductors, including Mengelberg, Walter, Mitropoulos, Bernstein, Boulez and Mehta, who helped make New York arguably the best place in the world to hear Mahler. The first performance of a Mahler work in New York was the "Resurrection," selected by the composer to be performed by Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, an ensemble that merged with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. The New York premiere was in 1908, 13 years after its world premiere in Berlin and one year before Mahler took to the podium of the New York Philharmonic. Thus were the first New York orchestral players initiated into the Mahler performance tradition.

The Second Symphony holds a very special place within this tradition and is often used to mark special occasions, such as the Philharmonic's 10,000th concert and Bernstein's 1000th concert with the orchestra. It also happened to be the last piece that Bernstein conducted in 1989, shortly before his death in 1990.

The opening movement, which was originally composed as a stand-alone musical poem titled Totenfeier ("Funeral Ritual"), introduces the listener to the struggle that defines the rest of the piece?the struggle between life and death, in which the music traces the pushing and contriving of a hero faced with death and still possessed by unanswerable questions, imagining that his lifetime has all been in vain. Through a series of thematic vignettes, Mahler takes the listener on a journey from life to death to "resurrection."

With Mahler being the quintessential composer of extreme emotionality and massive orchestration, it may seem counterintuitive to program his gargantuan Resurrection symphony with a piece titled Simple Songs. In fact, the two pieces share more in common than a scan of the titles would indicate. Simple Songs, a five-movement work for soprano and orchestra, is 43-year-old American composer Aaron Jay Kernis' contemporary answer to Mahler's outspoken search for meaning. Written in 1991 for the New Music Consort with soprano Susan Narucki (when Kernis was about the same age Mahler was during the composition of the Resurrection), Simple Songs documents Kernis' own interest in mysticism and diverse spiritual traditions. The work sets two psalms and translations of texts from Hildegard of Bingen, Sufi poet Rumi and Buddhist monk Ryokan in songs that require a wide range for the soprano. Soloist Jessica Jones already performed the piece under Maazel at a concert with the Chicago Symphony last fall.

Besides sharing a similar premise and a vibrant soprano part, the two works are both inspired by song forms. In Mahler's case it is Friedrich Klopstock's Aufersteh'n ("Resurrection Ode") that provides the fire for the immense finale. Mahler, who astounded himself with the scope of the Resurrection finale, bloated the original material over the boiling point, making the finale to Beethoven's Ninth seem timid. Kernis, on the other hand, looked to the song form to assure an expressive quality that was clear and pointed.

"It often happens after I've written a complex series of pieces that my natural reaction is to then try to write something as streamlined as I can," he explains. "That doesn't mean that the musical choices are any easier, in fact they are usually harder."

Don't let Kernis' reserved approach fool you. If there is any composer alive today who can stand up to Mahler's penchant for contrast and valiant orchestral statements, it is Kernis, who is as comfortable writing large-scale, intensely contrapuntal symphonic works that exploit the extremes of emotionality as he is with pieces like his first string quartet, musica celestis, and Simple Songs, that strive for straightforward lucidity.

Kernis' versatility has gained him a great deal of recognition both from audiences and the classical music establishment. A Philadelphia native, he studied formally with John Adams at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Elias Tanenbaum and Charles Wuorinen at the Manhattan School of Music, and Morton Subotnick, Bernard Rands and Jacob Druckman at Yale. He now makes New York his home and received his first New York Philharmonic performance at the age of 23 when the orchestra played his first orchestral work Dream of the Morning Sky. He was honored with a Pulitzer in 1998 for his second string quartet, and just last year received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for his work Colored Field for cello and orchestra.

For both Kernis and Mahler, freedom of expression is the goal, and Kernis often cites Mahler as an inspiration to his own art.

"For me, Mahler has always had an incredible inclusiveness, an inclusive spirit in his work in terms of the influences that came into it, the sheer vastness of it, and the wide range of emotions that he is willing to express, those ideas have been pivotal to me? The last movement of my piece touches on the voice of Mahler very deliberately."

For this reason, he always envisioned Simple Songs being performed alongside Mahler 4, but admits that the Resurrection isn't a bad option either.

"I really look forward to this concert, even though the Mahlerian forces are gargantuan and mine are relatively restrained."

With both forces, Mahler fans are in for a great treat.