Luogo e data di registrazione		Orchestra Hall, Chicago (USA) - ottobre 1983
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		James Mallinson
	Recording engineers		James Lock
	Prima Edizione LP		Decca | 411 731-1 | (1 LP) | durata 55' 59" | (p) 1984 | Digitale
	Edizione CD		Decca | 411 731-2 | (1 CD) | durata 55' 59" | (p) 1984 | DDD
	Note		(c) 1984, The Decca Record Company Limited, London

The startling originality of Mahler’s First Symphony earned him both hostility and ridicule when he conducted its first performance in Budapest on 20 November 1889, reactions which his music was to provoke for the rest of his life; for while his interpretative genius as a conductor of other people’s music was instantly appreciated by critics and public alike, very few listeners were able to see beyond the uncomfortable innovations of his own music to the unique vision that lay behind it. It has only very recently become clear that the Symphony as we know it did not reach its final form until shortly before publication in 1899. The work, which Mahler had begun as early as 1884, was entitled ‘Symphonic Poem’ at its Budapest premiere and consisted then of five movements. The original second movement was soon discarded (an Andante entitled ‘Blumine’, or ‘Flower piece’, it came to light again in 1967), and in the following years Mahler expanded the orchestration and revised the work to such an extent that hardly a bar was left untouched. The number of horns was increased from four to seven and a cor anglais and second timpanist were added, as well as a fifth trumpet and a fourth trombone to reinforce the horns in the coda of the finale. What is significant, however, is that apart from the removal of the second movement none of these revisions affected the musical content or structure of the Symphony. In the ten years between its first performance and its final revision for publication Mahler had not only attained the summit of his conducting career (he had been appointed Director of the Vienna Opera in 1897) but had also composed the Second and Third Symphonies; his awareness of his own creative personality must have grown immeasurably, and increased experience meant that he would now be confident of being able to express his musical ideas with the most direct and economical orchestral means. The first movement's slow introduction plunges us straight into Mahler’s unmistakable sound world as stylized bird-calls and distant military fanfares gradually emerge from a sustained A scored for string harmonics. The impact of such images in Mahler’s music is constantly enhanced by the apparently reckless way in which he juxtaposes them, creating immediate tensions between our varied reactions to different musical styles. Thus in the second movement a rough-hewn peasant Ländler is contrasted with a Trio which, half-affectionately and half-ironically, evokes the sentimentality of urban popular music. The third movement - the greatest cause of scandal for Mahler’s contemporaries - carries this mixture of disparate elements to an extreme as episodes of deliberately vulgar dance-band music (marked ‘With parody’) break into a grotesquely-scored minor-key canon on Frère Jacques (or rather, its German equivalent Bruder Martin). The task of the finale - the longest movement - is to weld these elements into a whole. The despairing F minor material which had briefly threatened the spring-like freshness of the first movement returns and now threatens to dominate the finale, but it is gradually overcome as Mahler works towards a supremely confident D major conclusion - a triumph of the creative will which, in this most remarkable of first symphonies, gives musical shape to the experiences which lie at the heart of all Mahler`s music: nostalgia for an ideal pastoral simplicity or for the innocence of childhood, a morbidly sensitive awareness of the remoteness and fragility of that innocence, and the turmoil of a passionately individual sensibility yearning for a self-transcending union with the natural world. Andrew Huth