Season Opening: Pappano’s Mahler 2 and Fujikura’s Amber Alchemy

About the Work

Amber Alchemy is a brand-new piece, and tonight is its first performance in the city that inspired it. Dai Fujikura wrote it for the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano on a commission from Nomura, the Japanese financial group, to mark the company’s centenary. The orchestra gave the world premiere at Suntory Hall in Tokyo on 28 September 2026, played it again in Osaka two days later, and now brings it home to open the 2026/27 Barbican season. Strangely, for a composer who has been going back and forth between Japan and Britain for more than thirty years, it is the first time Fujikura has been asked to write for the LSO.

The idea came from an unlikely place: the roof of Nomura’s London office, where the company keeps beehives. On a visit there Fujikura met a member of staff who had moved from finance into beekeeping with the firm’s support, and he found himself going back to the roof and reading about bees. What caught him was not the buzzing but the hive as a society. In his words it is “incredibly organised and at the same time completely organic”: thousands of tiny individual actions somehow add up to something far bigger than any single bee, a living architecture of labour, communication and care.

The title carries that idea in two directions. “Amber” is the colour of honey, with its warmth and glow. “Alchemy” is transformation, which Fujikura calls the heart of the piece: inside a hive nectar becomes honey, wax becomes architecture, and individual movement becomes collective meaning. There is a quieter second layer, too, fitting for a financial commission. Money also moves and is transformed through exchange, trust, risk and time, though Fujikura is careful to say the music is not literally about finance.

The music evokes these processes rather than illustrating them, so don’t expect a musical bee. His orchestral writing has long been full of shimmering, fluttering and trembling sounds, but here they are not imitations of insects. The piece is, by his own account, melodic and lyrical at root: many separate lines, each with its own shape and direction, that weave around one another, cluster together, pull apart and then suddenly line up, so that the whole orchestra seems to become a single organism. At around ten minutes for full orchestra, it is a compact curtain-raiser. It also makes a thoughtful partner for Mahler’s Second, another work about what emerges when countless small lives are gathered into one.

What to Listen For

Listen for lines rather than for one big tune. Fujikura’s material is melodic, but no single melody is in charge. Try following one strand, a violin figure or a woodwind line, and notice how it gets drawn into a thicket of other voices moving in their own directions. That busy, many-voiced texture is the hive.

Then listen for the moments when everything comes together. Fujikura describes separate lines that sometimes suddenly coordinate, so that the whole orchestra seems to become a single organism. He hopes listeners will carry away the feeling of “a complicated world somehow becoming harmonious without losing all its individual life”. These moments of alignment are the payoff of the piece. They are the musical equivalent of thousands of individual actions adding up to something larger.

Listen too for colour: the shimmer, flutter and tremble that run through Fujikura’s orchestral writing, and the warm, glowing sound the title’s “amber” suggests. Because the piece is so new, nobody in the hall has a settled idea of how it goes. That is part of the pleasure. You are hearing it at the very start of its life, played by the orchestra it was written for.

About the Work

Mahler’s Second Symphony, the ‘Resurrection’, is one of the biggest and most ambitious works in the orchestral repertoire, and it took him six years to find its ending. The first movement began life in 1888 as a free-standing symphonic poem called Todtenfeier (“Funeral Rites”), a vast funeral march for the hero of his First Symphony. Then Mahler stalled. He had asked the great questions (why did we live, why did we suffer, is it all a meaningless joke?) and could not find an answer to them. The middle movements came in 1893, drawing on his settings of the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, but the finale would not come.

The breakthrough came in March 1894, at the Hamburg funeral of the conductor Hans von Bülow. A boys’ choir sang a setting of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s hymn Die Auferstehung (“The Resurrection”), and Mahler later wrote that it struck him “like lightning”. He took Klopstock’s opening verses and added lines of his own, which carry the finale’s central message: nothing is lost, and everything that has lived will rise again. He finished the symphony that year and conducted the complete work for the first time in Berlin on 13 December 1895.

The scale is enormous. Five movements run about eighty to ninety minutes, and the forces are huge: a greatly enlarged orchestra with quadruple woodwind, ten horns and extra trumpets, a group of brass and percussion playing offstage, organ, soprano and alto soloists, and a large mixed chorus. Mahler meant every bit of it. The voices arrive only in the last two movements. After four movements of purely orchestral searching, the arrival of the human voice, first a single alto and then a whispered chorus, is the symphony’s turning point.

Mahler asked in the score for a pause of at least five minutes after the huge first movement, a gap that is rarely observed in full today. It is a sign of how he heard the work: a stark, tragic opening, a set of recollections of life, and then a long journey toward the finale’s vision of resurrection. The symphony ends not in a church but in something more universal, a promise of redemption for all. For Mahler, who was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism two years after the premiere, the vision was personal rather than doctrinal.

It is a natural choice to open a season. The LSO and Pappano toured it to Japan before bringing it home. With the London Symphony Chorus, the orchestra’s own choir, joining for the finale, it is a full-company statement of intent.

What to Listen For

First movement (Allegro maestoso). The symphony opens with a violent tremolo in the violins and violas and a savage, snarling figure in the cellos and double basses. This is a funeral march on the grandest scale, and in Mahler’s own words it asks the big question about life and death. Listen for the contrast between the grim marching music and a gentle, consoling second theme, high in the violins, that keeps trying to offer comfort. The movement builds to shattering climaxes and ends with a sudden, brutal descending run.

Second movement (Andante moderato). After that, an old Austrian Ländler, a gentle country dance, arrives like a memory of happier days. Listen for the charming, lilting strings, and later for a passage where the strings play pizzicato under a singing cello line.

Third movement (Scherzo). This is an orchestral version of Mahler’s own Wunderhorn song about St Anthony preaching to the fishes: the fishes listen politely to the sermon and then swim off exactly as they were. The music flows in an endless, slightly sardonic stream of semiquavers, starting with two timpani strokes. Mahler heard it as life seen from a distance, busy and senseless. Near the end comes a terrifying outburst that he called a “cry of despair”.

Fourth movement (Urlicht, “Primal Light”). Out of the silence, the alto sings a simple Wunderhorn song, “O Röschen rot!” (“O little red rose”), with a hushed brass chorale. Humanity lies in great need and pain, and longs to return to God. After forty minutes of instrumental music, listen for how the plain human voice changes everything.

Fifth movement (Finale). The finale erupts with the same scream of despair heard in the scherzo, and then unfolds as a vast drama. Listen for the offstage horns calling from far away, like voices in a desert. Then a great march of the dead breaks out, with percussion crescendos and ever more urgent brass. It collapses into the “great summons”: offstage brass calls answered by a solitary flute and piccolo, like a bird singing over an empty world. Then comes the most magical moment of all: the chorus enters almost inaudibly, unaccompanied, singing “Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n” (“Rise again, yes, you will rise again”). From there the voices grow, with the soprano soaring above the chorus. The music builds, with organ and full brass and the offstage players brought into the hall, to an overwhelming final climax of bells, organ and full chorus. It is one of the great endings in music.