James Levine & The London Symphony Orchestra – Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1975)

January 23, 2013
James Levine & The London Symphony Orchestra – Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1975)

This is my second £1 Mahler purchase, and the second time I’ve been disappointed at not receiving some bat-shit insane classical music. I’m guessing that maybe Mahler gained his ambitions over time? The 4th is rather straight forward but complex in it’s own way, and number 6 (the final symphony he wrote) is absolutely maddening as fuck. Number 1 however, after building and building from nothing over a long period  breaks into something that sounds like a typical background film score. The second movement, however pleasant, is like something out of an old Disney film (before they started having rap music in lieu of orchestrated scores) and drags on a bit for me.

Side two opens beautifully with the mournful third movement (you can fuck off if you think I’m going to write out all the German titles) that sounds like more of a soundtrack out of a Bioware game, or maybe earlier Elder Scrolls stuff by Jeremy Soule. It is like early Mortiis or prison Burzum but with a full blown orchestra and it sounds bloody brilliant, if I’m honest. If I close my eyes and concentrate for a bit I can literally see a small band of various adventurers shuffling around the wilderness of Baldur’s Gate’s Sword Coast at my command. Eventually the composition starts to get all Disney bunnies hopping everywhere before it fizzles out on a rather eery note. The final movement starts with a heart-attack inducing crescendo before becoming something that I think would go well to a montage of being chased through a busy, ambiguous European city by the Gestapo. Very good.

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