Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Dudamel, Barbican review - an epic journey from gossamer-like intimacy to apocalyptic rage

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his great exploration of the cosmic order, ascending from raw paganism to sublime transcendence. It's technically the longest symphony ever composed, and here it swept the audience through an epic journey that tilted between passages of gossamer-like intimacy and outbursts of apocalyptic rage.

The orchestra is renowned for its full-blooded performances, yet yesterday evening it felt that the stakes were higher than usual for the ensemble that first captured the imagination of British classical music audiences at the Proms in 2007. In recent weeks the state-funded orchestra has come under attack from fellow Venezuelans – most prominently the pianist Gabriela Montero – for continuing, in effect, to represent President Nicolas Maduro who blatantly stole last year’s election.

This sold-out concert was one of a series marking the 50^th year of El Sistema, the world-famous youth music training programme for young, often impoverished, Venezuelans whose lives have been transformed by the orchestra. In the programme, Dudamel – who has also been appointed as the Music and Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic – wrote a powerful statement in which he declared, “Lately I have been thinking about the relationship between the individual and society – particularly how to balance our personal needs with those of the larger community… The harmony that the orchestra creates has the potential to reach far beyond the stage. I have seen parents who hold completely opposing political views sit next to each other in the audience while their children play together, side by side.”

Certainly this was an evening that felt as if it was far more about Mahler than Maduro. The players here are no longer children, yet they played the symphony with a passion and vibrancy that made it clear why the audience gave a fifteen-minute standing ovation when it was initially performed in 1902. In the first of the six movements – which evokes Pan and Dionysus – the sonorous opening by eight horns was succeeded by a drum beat so subtle yet insistent, it felt like your heartbeat. As a frenzy of strings ensued, it seemed as if a powerful, anarchic force was rising up from the earth. Dudamel conducted as if the music were coursing through him like electricity, guiding the players between passages of rhapsodic optimism and sequences that evoked the more sinister forces of the world.

This symphony depicts Mahler’s vision of the cosmic scale, moving on from the pagan first movement to evoke life forms of increasing complexity. In the second movement, the delicate woodwind opening introduced us to intertwining forms of plant life, with the harps providing streaks of sunlight and skittering strings conveying the chaos of the undergrowth. Mahler was writing the symphony in the year that the Lumière Brothers first screened a film for a paying audience – and as in film there was a sense throughout that we were zooming in and out of the scene before us. Sometimes the orchestral texture was lush and complex, at others – as during the exquisite duet between first violin and harp – it felt like we were being invited to contemplate the structure of one single plant in all its beauty.

In the third movement we encountered the birds and the beasts of the forest in a piece that grows out of Mahler’s earlier Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magical Horn) – a mischievous piece that asks “Who shall sing to us all summer long” after the cuckoo falls silent. Here the orchestra perfectly caught the teasing tone as the cuckoo and nightingale engage in a singing contest, and the other animals cavort around them. Then, in one of the most beautiful moments of the symphony, we heard Pacho Flores playing the posthorn offstage, filtering through like a call from another dimension. After that we were back to the chaos of the forest, which became steadily more agitated till the movement finished with a joyful shimmer of the harp.

In the fourth movement, mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa (pictured above) sang the immortal lines from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – Richard Strauss would compose his own famous setting in the same year that Mahler finished this symphony. This ode to humankind ponders the depths of the pain of existence at the same time as it exalts the redemption of joy. Crebassa’s wonderful expressive voice filled each line to the brim with a contained emotion that was all the more powerful because you could sense the surface tension that stopped it from overflowing. Towards the end of the movement, horns poignantly echoed and amplified her sense of lament.In the last few bars the two choirs for the fifth movement stood up – the Tiffin Choir (for children) and the female singers from the London Symphony Chorus. Instantly they lifted us into the realm of angels that Mahler was describing, with the children wittily echoing the sound of bells. This provided a striking contrast to Crebassa’s re-entrance, her voice resonant and turbulent as she begged for redemption. Then the children and women’s chorus together swirled us back into paradise.

There was already the sense that this symphony contained enough musical and philosophical ideas for a lifetime, but the sixth movement took us to another level altogether. Following the beatific calm of the opening string passages, the music’s gentle lyricism evoked an all-embracing benevolence that was heightened alternately by the piercing beauty of the woodwind and the sonorous sweetness of the brass. Dudamel perfectly channelled the ebb and swell of the emotions so that the music felt like a balm for the chaos and uncertainty had come before. After the full orchestra came together for the resonant ending, in which Dudamel’s movements powerfully echoed those of the timpani players, the whole audience rose to its feet for a moment that felt like everything to do with freedom and little to do with dictatorship.

• Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra play again at the Barbican tonight
• More classical reviews on theartsdesk