Steve Hackman Conducts His Mahler X Notorious B.I.G. X 2Pac

Performance Run Time: Approximately 85 minutes.
Audience Advisory: This performance contains strong language. 

Conductor and creator Steve Hackman fuses the quintessential music of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony for a transformative exploration of life, death, legacy, struggle, and triumph. Featuring favorites like “Hypnotize,” “Ambitions as a Ridah,” “California Love,” “Juicy,” “Keep Ya Head Up,” and “Sky’s the Limit,” the performance weaves these artists together in a thoroughly original way, with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 propelling the work forward.

The first act begins with the sublime music of Mahler’s Urlicht (primal light), with the voices of Biggie and Tupac rising through the loudspeakers — each rapper prophesying his own death. As the musicians play the fiery first-movement funeral rites of the Mahler symphony, Biggie and Tupac’s songs are interpolated in thematically linked pairs: the hard road they face in “Everyday Struggle” and “Me Against the World”; the ravaging of their communities in “Things Done Changed” and “Ghetto Gospel”; gangster life in “Notorious Thugs” and “2 of Americaz Most Wanted”; and letting loose in “Party and Bullsh*t” and “Hellrazor.” The first movement builds to an explosive peak, with the two songs that epitomize the East-West coast feud that many believe led to both rappers’ deaths, “Who Shot Ya” and “Hit Em Up.”

For the second act, the focus turns to social justice and transcendence. After the explosive opening of the Mahler fifth movement, the music slows to a complete halt. Over this stillness, we hear Tupac’s enduring and poignant lyric: “Here on Earth, tell me: what’s a Black life worth?” We hear the painful pleas from both artists for equality and justice in songs like “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto” and “Changes.” As Mahler’s music whirls and rises to its triumphant climax, we are reminded of the powerful and profound legacy of these two artists, who, twenty-five years after their deaths, are as relevant and essential as ever.

“Among the most daring and innovative modern experiments in avant-classical” — Seen and Heard International