Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw can claim the most enduring historical connection with Mahler’s symphonies of any orchestra due to their erstwhile principal conductor Willem Mengelberg, who invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct the Third and Fourth Symphonies in 1903 and 1904 respectively and after the composer’s death became one of his chief disciples. In Amsterdam, Mahler’s music soon came to be programmed more frequently than any other composer’s, giving rise in 1920 to a Mahler Festival tradition which involved Mengelberg conducting all the orchestral works in the space of three weeks, some of them, such as the Sixth Symphony at the inaugural festival, twice in one concert.
The Concertgebouw’s programming is more balanced now but Mahler remains a cornerstone of their repertoire, and is in safe if not always conventional hands with current principal conductor Mariss Jansons. To that end, it was difficult to understand what he was striving for in the opening to this First Symphony. The ethereal seven-octave A in the strings and introduction of the falling fourth in the winds (the symphony’s thematic kernel) can be taken as the mysterious stirrings of nature or as something of greater tension, if one notes the exact placement of Mahler’s marking ‘Wie ein Naturlaut’ (‘As if voiced by nature’) as applying to the fourths alone and follows Theodor Adorno’s observation of the pedal note as an industrialized sound (the unpleasant whistling of a steam engine, he called it); but Jansons’ reading, lacking in character and yet far off from a potentially curious inertness, avoided these approaches and left a vacuum in their place. The rest of the movement unfolded flowingly, give or take the winds occasionally racing ahead of the strings, but remained unusually dull for this conductor, with interest limited to aspects of the playing – the distinctive timbre of the horns’ soft playing, produced with throat vibrato, easing into their fuller golden sound, or the celli playing much of the movement on the D string with a muted take on the famous Mengelberg portamento. A boisterous coda livened things up a little and its vibrancy carried over into a second movement taken at an agreeable tempo – neither stilted nor racing, its lilt evoked the Ländler’s rusticity without affected leadenness. Jansons’ gift for finding an elusive balance in matters of expression was also shown with the lurching modulations into D major, leaned into with ideal weight, and the return of the portamento, never anachronistic or mannered, in the Trio.
The Ländler had been capped with an unconvincing accelerando commenced much earlier than Mahler indicates in the score, and unproductive infidelity also characterized a slow movement stripped of many its distinguishing features, most glaringly the wraithlike timbre of the violins’ col legno which the scoring so carefully accommodates. The klezmer-inflected passage was done in Bernstein’s pronounced vein, but while registering as an interruption – strings were again behind, though their slowness to catch up spoke revealingly – it remained integral to the movement. Something of a klezmerized accent continued in the wind and brass playing of the final movement, offering the first convincing instance of Jansons reappraising the music as he is typically inclined. Mahler’s flare-ups came and went with a natural spontaneity, and a unifying impulse connected the movement’s turbulent, lyrical and jubilant sections while denying none of the introspective moments their inward quality or indeed allowing the symphony to conclude in too grotesquely triumphalist a manner.