Luogo e data di registrazione		All Saints' Church, London (Gran Bretagna) - febbraio 1989
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Recording Producer		Wolfgang Stengel
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Recording Engineer		Hans-Rudolf Müller
	Editing		Oliver Rogalla
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 429 228-2 | LC 0173 | 1 CD - 57' 03" | (p) 1990 | DDD
	Note		-

Mahler`s twenties - the 1880s - were fairly restless years. He worked as a conductor successively in Laibach (Ljubljana), Kassel, Prague, Leipzig and Budapest, often at odds with his associates and superiors, leading a turbulent emotional life and channelling emotion into composition. His affair in Kassel (1883-84) with the singer Johanna Richter helped to inspire not only those passionate songs of love and despair, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (to Mahler’s own texts), but also the First Symphony. And if one love affair served to launch the symphony, another (with the wife of Carl Maria von Weber’s grandson in Leipzig) seems to have spurred it on to completion in 1888. In March of that year Mahler wrote to a friend that the work “has turned out so overwhelming, it came gushing out of me like a mountain torrent! All of a sudden all the sluicegates opened!” What we now know as Mahler’s First Symphony was called “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” when first performed in Budapest in 1889: Part One contained the first movement and scherzo with, in between, an Andante that Mahler eventually discarded; Part Two comprised the funeral march and finale. For the second performance, in Hamburg in 1893, Mahler reinforced the music’s programmaticism with a more specific title: "Titan, a tone-poem in the form of a symphony". By now the two parts and the various movements all had titles. Titan was an early 19th-century novel by Jean Paul Richter, and although at no stage did the symphony follow the events of the book the essential idea of an heroic protagonist revelling in nature and struggling against the deadening forces of philistinism can clearly be traced in the music. Another quite distinct programmatic source lies behind the titles successively given to the slow movement, described first as “in the manner of Callot” (a French etcher whom Mahler probably encountered through E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot”), then as “the hunter’s funeral procession”: this could refer to an ironic woodcut by Moritz von Schwind in which animals bearing torches and banners accompany a coffin on its way to burial. For the Hamburg performance Mahler also entitled the second, Andante movement “Blumine” - "flower chapter". The movement was derived from some incidental music Mahler had provided for Scheffel’s play Der Trumpeter von Säckingen in 1884. It was only by the time of the work’s performance in Berlin in 1896 that the programmatic titles were removed, along with the “Blumine” movement. The work was now called simply "Symphony in D major for large orchestra". Mahler presumably decided that the programme, added initially in the interests of comprehensibility, and to justify to disconcerted audiences the music’s raw emotionalism and extreme changes of mood, was more of a hindrance than a help. The work had to stand or fall by its formal as well as emotional conviction. By Brahmsian standards it is certainly heterogeneous, very much the work of a young composer whose previous efforts had been almost entirely vocal - the large-scale cantala Das klagende Lied and the collections of songs, Lieder and Gesänge and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. In its expansiveness Mahler’s symphony is closer to Bruckner than to Brahms. Yet its exploration of the ironic, the macabre, the hectic could scarcely be less Brucknerian. Mahler owed more to the opera house than the organ loft, and although precedents for programme music in symphonic form can be found - in Liszt as well as lesser composers like Goldmark and Raff - the musical atmosphere he created from the confrontation between his own highly personal, songlike material and the hallowed formal categories and procedures of the traditional symphony was already distinctive and arresting. Part of the title originally given to the first movement was "From the days of youth", and its extended slow introduction presents a ravishing aural picture of the world coming to life. The hushed opening is marked "Like a sound of nature", and as the germinal melodic interval of a descending fourth speeds up it acquires the scarcely necessary inscription “Like the call of the cuckoo”. Yet these details, along with a principal theme taken from the second and most cheerful of the Gesellen songs, are part of a substantial, effectively organized form. Of particular significance is the gradual transformation of minor tonality into major as the first movement proper gets under way. This modal contrast serves to generate tension in the development section and to prepare for the appearance (in the remote key of F minor) of the agitated theme that will dominate the finale. As far as the first movement is concerned the potential crisis represented by that theme and its treatment is defused: the cheerful, pastoral material returns, and the movement ends with a brief, fast coda like a burst of exuberant laughter. The second movement derives its main idea from another of the early songs, “Hans und Grete”. Though not labelled Ländler by Mahler - the programmatic title was "In full sail" - it is a particularly attractive example of that folklike dance form, at first uncomplicated, with an ebullient opening tune, but developing some tension in its second half. After the more reflective trio, with that tonic F which provides the main challenge to the symphony’s basic D-tonality, the Ländler returns in abbreviated form. Programmatically, the slow movement evidently counters and rejects the pastoral simplicity and optimism which have dominated the symphony so far. Yet just as Mahler’s expression of these moods in the first two movements was not devoid of questioning and tension, so his sombre, superbly orchestrated funeral procession provides its own well-developed contrasts. First there is self-mockery, as the orchestral round on “Frère Jacques", initiated by the marvellously eerie solo double bass, yields to material marked “with parody” (a maudlin pair of trumpets particularly prominent). Later, there is sublime, bittersweet resignation, quoting the final section of the Gesellen songs with its stark cadence cancelling major-key warmth with minor-key chill. After this the “Frère Jacques” procession resumes, and gradually disappears into the distance. The finale is the work’s most ambitious movement. It seems to have given Mahler the most trouble (his revisions to the earlier movements were mainly of orchestration) and its form may well leave something to be desired: contrasts are extreme, the most exciting moment of harmonic resolution comes at a relatively early stage. Yet it is a vivid depiction of what the original, Dantesque title described, as a journey from Hell to Paradise: from struggle, through lyric reflection, to renewed struggle and final triumph. The thematic links with the first movement are underlined by the recall of that movement’s introduction at the finale's mid-point, before the recapitulation of the contrasting lyric melody prepares the final victory of “Paradise” over “Hell”, and the apotheosis of the introduction’s theme. There may be as much of hysteria as jubilation in the concluding, prolonged affirmation of the D major tonic harmony: it was this aspect of Mahler that Shostakovich, notably in his Fifth Symphony, would take up and make his own, Yet the excitement is genuine. The youthful Mahler, the music proclaims, is serving notice on the symphonic tradition, and the rest of his life would be devoted to redefining that form and giving it a uniquely personal diversity of scope and substance. Arnold Whittall