Prom-goers will surely remember hearing these works from Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw in the 1995 season. The conductor may not be the most interventionist of Mahlerians but one has only to set his performance of No. 1 (recorded back on home turf) against Pierre Boulez’s recent run-through of No. 7 (DG, 6/96) to see which of the two means business. It is nearly ten years since the Concertgebouw last gave us Mahler’s First Symphony on disc – Bernstein’s near-definitive account was recorded live in 1987 – and, surprisingly, the timings of the two versions are nearly identical. Surprisingly, because they differ so radically. In place of Bernstein’s inspired subjectivity, or intuitive ‘rightness’ as some would claim, Chailly gives us a straightforward symphonic overview in which the more overtly programmatic elements are never allowed to threaten the work’s structural integrity. Lest it be thought that this implies ‘worthy but dull’, two things give this performance a very special appeal: the quality of the orchestral playing and the scrupulous attention paid to phrasing and dynamics.
The first movement is particularly fresh. How often do we get a genuine ppp from the horns before the cantabile melody of the cellos and the active part of the development (track 2, 11'13''ff.)? How often can one register the difference between p and pp in the cuckoo calls of the clarinet? Or, in the second movement, the crescendo in the cellos at 2'00''? And if the Trio is on the slow side, initial reservations are premature; the players’ lightness of phrasing precludes any hint of sentimentality. No doubt the two middle movements will be too emotionally reticent for some: that second movement hardly evokes a peasants’ merrymaking (Bernstein and Solti are altogether cruder), while the third is purged of rusticity, its more bizarre and hysterical elements reduced to a series of incidental if novel orchestral effects. And yet, where a lesser orchestra might have sounded plain, the Royal Concertgebouw imbue the music with real character. Only at the start of the finale is the voltage perhaps too low to sustain tension. (Bernstein is unsurpassed here, as is Kubelik in the previous movement.) The ending goes very well, the horns correctly prominent, the all-too-common percussive thwack on the final crotchet conscientiously eschewed.
Chailly’s enterprising coupling (placed first) is much more convincing than you might suppose – an orchestration of Berg’s early Piano Sonata by the young Dutch composer Theo Verbey. Aiming to clarify the complex polyphonic working behind the keyboard texture, Verbey employs an orchestral style redolent of Berg’s Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6 and does so with real flair and refinement. The appropriation of echt-Bergian sonorities (string tremolandos am Steg, melismatic wisps of cor anglais and bass clarinet) ensures that the music scarcely betrays its origins. Much more relevant than another Blumine. The recording quality is excellent.'