Sakari Oramo's programme with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra looked crazily ambitious.
Mahler's First Symphony was preceded by a huge first half of overtures by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, operatic arias by Heinrich Marschner and Adolphe Adam, and six songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn. But this bizarre line-up was actually a recreation of the programme Mahler himself conducted in Hamburg in 1893, on the second-ever performance of the First Symphony.
No one would dare to programme the piece like this today. But the short individual numbers in the first half revealed fascinating sides to Mahler's music. The intense lyricism of Des Knaben Wunderhorn felt closely connected to the charming operatic trifles of Marschner and Adam (Mahler was familiar with conducting these pieces in the opera house).
The radical thing about the Wunderhorn settings was not their complexity, but rather their rawness and immediacy. Soprano Solveig Kringelborn and baritone Christopher Maltman characterised these dramas of love and death with operatic vividness. With Oramo's volatile accompaniments, the pieces cut through the refinement of the concert hall and depict instead a rustic utopia.
This First Symphony was a different kind of piece from the one we are used to hearing. Especially in its original, five-movement form (Mahler cut the second movement, Blumine, before the piece was published), it was not so much a unified musical whole as a lyrical collection of different moods.
Oramo gave each movement a distinct soundworld, from the reflective calm of Blumine to the terrifying fanfares of the finale. His dynamic partnership with the CBSO produced brilliantly exciting playing. There was nothing manicured or precious about this performance, which made the symphony seem as compelling and unpredictable as it must have been in 1893.
