Mahler: Symphony No. 1.(Sound recording review)

Mahler: Symphony No. 1. Sir Georg Solti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Decca Originals 475 8230.

At the moment, my favorite Mahler First is still Sir Charles Mackerras's on EMI Eminence, but certainly this 1984 recording from another "Sir," Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony, can't be far behind. It has all the control, symphonic structure, intensity, and atmosphere of the very best versions, including Mackerras, Horenstein, Haitink, and Bernstein.

When CDs first became popular in the early eighties, it was Mahler whose symphonies were most quickly represented in the catalogue. In spite of a late start (but thank you maestros Walter and Bernstein), Mahler has become the darling of the music-loving set. His works combine good, old-fashioned nineteenth-century Romantic melodies along with bizarre, often chaotic, experimental twentieth-century modernism. These characteristics are no better displayed than in the composer's First Symphony, where the opening movement begins with a mysterious "Awakening of Day" or Spring or whatever, followed by fanfares and then several lush and rhapsodic, if rustic, melodies, leading to a Funeral March that only Mahler would have dared, part parody, part wistful musing, and entirely peculiar. The Finale starts with a thunderous series of orchestral crescendos, followed by bits and pieces of the first movement's themes, settling into rich romance, and ending in strong, solid affirmative concluding outbursts, tying up all the disparate elements of the symphony as a whole.

Solti handles all of this easily. The opening mists are not projected as ...