Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D major ‘Titan’ – Riccardo Chailly

Recorded live at the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig January 2015

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 is an incomprehensible wonder of music history, rigorously peculiar, disturbingly new, and timelessly modern. ‘Wie ein Naturlaut’ (‘Like a sound of nature’) is indicated above the first notes of the symphony. It is both the ‘prelude’ and the key to his symphonic cosmos as a whole. Mahler captures this music of the world, transforms it into a symphony in the old, comprehensive sense of the word and uses it to create his masterpiece of harmony. From the connotation of militarily marches to folk songs, from dance and popular music to animal sounds: everything has its place in Mahler’s symphonic world. Composed over the course of just a few months at the beginning of 1888 in Leipzig, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 is a true musical awakening. Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig bring Mahler’s sounds of nature to life in a riveting performance.

Reviews:

BBC Music Magazine July 2018

There is nothing inappropriate or anticlimactic about this performance…You can see the right emotions featured in Chailly’s face. His eyes are shut, Karajan-like, at the creation of the world, but soon flash open. The climaxes are carefully graded…The orchestra’s commitment is palpable, and there’s some fine camerawork getting in deep…In other words, short of the score, your complete kit for Mahler One. – 5 out of 5 stars

Gramophone Magazine June 2018

There’s an irresistible clarity to Chailly’s illumination of Mahler’s symphonic antecedents: the deformation of Beethoven’s Ninth in the opening bars, as well as their more direct debt to the moment of sudden mystery in the middle of the finale to Brahms’s Second…he’s one of those musicians who not only know that there is always more to say but who challenge themselves to communicate it.