Celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the university’s music department got into top gear on Saturday, with some 400 singers and instrumentalists under John Stringer in a moving account of Mahler’s Second Symphony, nicknamed The Resurrection.

York has not seen an orchestra of this size in the past 40 years, if indeed it ever has, with 66 strings and a brass section including 13 horns and ten trumpets, some of them invited from off-campus. It was enough to wake the dead.

So much for the statistics. What was profoundly stimulating was the concentration and commitment of the players throughout a work that lasts the better part of an hour and a half. The brass were predictably assertive.

But it was the strings, led by John Cummins, who truly dazzled: right to the back desks there was a rhythmic vitality that could only have been put down to sheer determination. There was an eerie percussiveness in the pianissimo strings at the start of the Andante, complemented by neat pizzicato at its close.

Angelica Cathariou brought a delectable legato to her mezzo-soprano solo in Urlicht (Primaeval light), leavened by rich chest tone. In the finale, Jane Irwin’s soprano soared satisfyingly above the chorus, whose hushed opening was ethereal. It made the thunderous climax, with four trumpets behind the audience, all the more terrifying by contrast. Perhaps we missed the majesty of an organ. But it was a stunning evening nonetheless.