Search - Gustav Mahler, Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra :: Mahler: Symphonie No. 1

Slow to get started

Klingsor Tristan | Suffolk | 08/22/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is a live performance that gets better as it goes on. While conjuring a beautifully balanced introduction with wonderfully balanced horns within the string harmonics, the main theme of the first movement is a little four-square. It seems that Rattle is determined to make it a real first-subject tune, worthy of its symphonic context, rather than indulge its fahrenden Gesellen ancestry with the more relaxed, gemutlich feel that, say, a Barbirolli gives it. This desire to emphasise the classical strengths of the movement leads Rattle into more exaggerated speeding up and slowing down than we expect from him in Mahler, usually in an attempt to point up the architectural structure of the music. It ends up feeling a bit too pulled about and a little flat.



The second landler movement sounds as if it is going to go on in the same vein. The main section here is bit plain-Jane, too - neither the energy of a Horenstein or a Bernstein nor the wonderfully Breughelian pesante stomp of Barbirolli (either with the Halle or, especially, with the NYPO). But then we get lift off. The trio suddenly starts to sparkle with wonderfully lifted waltz rhythms. It's as if the gears have all suddenly engaged. Rattle's slow movement is alive to all its startling changes of mood - the heavy tramp of the Huntsman's funeral (it's said to be based on a Caillot painting of the woodland animals burying their persecutor, set to a dirge-like minor-key Frere Jacques or Bruder Martin): then Austrian town-band oom-pah: then wild, excitable klezmer-style dance music: and then the sad but beautiful sounds of the heartbroken lover from the second fahrenden Gesellen song in this symphony, 'Die zwei blauen Augen'. All these elements work together by setting off flashes and reflections of each other from their close juxtaposition.



The funeral march treads to its tam-tam coloured end and, with a great shriek from the orchestra, we're off on the finale (Rattle is always very good at getting his producers to obey Mahler's instructions for the pauses between movements). Like many Mahler finales (e.g. 2, 6, 7, 8) this can sound diffuse and unstructured in the wrong hands. Here Rattle's ability to hold things together with real symphonic cohesion does work. The second subject soars on the strings as it should, the return to the very opening of the symphony seems absolutely right in context and the peroration is suitably triumphant. This is as fine a reading of this movement as you'll find.



On this disc, you also get 'Blumine' for your money, the movement that Mahler borrowed for the symphony from his incidental music for Der Trompeter von Sakkingen but later rejected. It is first on the disc, but you can obviously progamme it into context if that's the way you want to hear the symphony. Personally I think Mahler was right, charmingly sentimental though the movement is. It gets a suitably atmospheric reading from Rattle here.

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