Eighty minutes that can turn your life around—the “Resurrection” Symphony requires no preamble, and there will be those who say it is folly, if not sacrilege, to attempt one. Apparently Sir Antonio Pappano disagrees. As a gateway from workaday reality to the sublimities of Gustav Mahler, he “proposes” (as the French say) the U.K. premiere of Amber Alchemy by Dai Fujikura. Commissioned for the centenary of the Japanese financial-services group Nomura, Amber Alchemy evokes the rooftop beehives at Nomura’s London offices in a humming soundscape for 12 winds, 11 brass, three percussion, timpani, and strings. “A beehive,” Fujikura wrote in a note for the Tokyo premiere, “is an astonishing society—hyper-organized yet organic, built from thousands of small, precise actions. Individual gestures accumulate into something larger than any single bee: a living architecture, a shared intelligence, a system of labor, communication, memory, and care.” I’ll hazard a guess that Mahler would have been charmed. Don’t his own much-loved Rückert-Lieder include a song that conjures up bees’ buzzy busyness as an analogue of honeyed artistic creation? —Matthew Gurewitsch