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| DG Signature (Mid price) (LP) 410 845-1 (Cassette) 410 845-4 From 2530993 (5/78). |
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Ozawa's 1978 recording of Mahler's First Symphony is notable for the brilliance and sheen of both the playing and the interpretation. This is not a measured or nostalgic view of the symphony. It is as alert and nervously clear-sighted as youth itself, a youthfully literal reading in effect, recorded with limpid clarity at lower dynamic levels but tending to brassy reverberation in the big climaxes. As if to underline the sense of youthful imaginings rather than mature recollections of youth, DG have finally played a card which it seems they've had up their sleeves for the last six years; they have included the "Blumine" movement, originally included and later deleted by Mahler: the first of several trumpet-or post-horn-led summer idylls to appear in Mahler's music. Ozawa conducts it with evident sympathy and he is wonderfully sensitive to texture and colour in the woodland funeral march. The rapt lyrical subject in the finale is also lovingly shaped by him, though as EG observed the first big D flat statement does sound a little bit as though it is in quotation marks. I doubt whether even the Boston Symphony could achieve so broad and sinuous a reading with the conductor beating in two, as Mahler directs.
Horenstein (Unicorn-Kanchana RHS310, 12/69) and Kubelik (DG 2535 172, 5/68), both at mid-price, achieve everything Mahler asks for at a more flowing pace, more obviously two-in-a-bar. In spite of the curious omission of the Scherzo's first repeat, Kubelik seems to be the more searching interpreter of the work, Still, versions with the "Blumine" movement, though not representative of Mahler's final wishes, do have a curiosity value, and Ozawa's is perhaps the best five-movement account of the symphony we've yet had.
RO