Refreshing new album by Minnesota Orchestra revisits a Mahler landmark

Performances of Mahler's music tend to divide critics. When the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra's 1940 recording of the composer's Symphony No. 1 was rereleased in the CD era, one reviewer hailed it as "magnificent." Another trashed it as "hysterically neurotic, poorly played, badly recorded." Go figure.

Led by the legendary Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was the orchestra's music director from 1937 to '49, it was the first-ever complete recording of that work.

Eight decades later, the orchestra — long since renamed the Minnesota Orchestra — is revisiting Mahler's early masterpiece in a new recording led by current music director Osmo Vänskä.

As with previous releases in this ongoing series (Symphonies 2, 5 and 6 are already available) Vänskä proves to be a more nuanced Mahlerian than many of his CD rivals. The opening movement has the freshness of a May morning, and is relaxed and pastoral where other conductors mine the notes for hidden tensions.

The quality of sound captured in Orchestra Hall is exceptionally clear and wide-ranging, a hallmark of Sweden's BIS label, which is releasing Vänskä's Mahler cycle.

The second-movement Scherzo bristles with a happy outdoor vitality, the violin glissandos yipping gleefully and woodwinds colorfully embossing the genial waltz rhythms of the Trio section.

Vänskä wisely takes the spooky funeral march movement at a purposeful pace, and Mahler's tart parody of klezmer music is eerie without slipping into caricature.

There's some choice viola playing in the movement's calmer central section, where Vänskä's placing of the first and second violins on either side of the podium allows a greater textural bandwidth than seating them together.

The finale is by far the most explosive part of the First Symphony, and its turbulence is all the more effective for Vänskä's not cranking up the volume prematurely in the earlier movements. The orchestral playing is tough and powerful, as it needs to be in this long concluding movement, but it never turns crude or panicky.

And that is Vänskä's special gift with Mahler — to fully energize this wonderfully full-blooded and dynamic music without encouraging it to boil messily over. It makes this new Minnesota Orchestra version of the First Symphony a constant pleasure and enlightenment to listen to.

Released on Friday, the album is available to purchase at Orchestra Hall or online at minnesotaorchestra.org.

Terry Blain is a freelance classical music critic for the Star Tribune. Reach him at artsblain@gmail.com.