Luogo e data di registrazione		Kingsway Hall, London (Inghilterra) - gennaio/febbraio 1964
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		John Culshaw
	Recording engineers		James Lock
	Prima Edizione LP		Decca ffss | SXL 6113 (stereo) - LXT 6113 (mono) | (1 LP) | durata 53' 51" | (p) 1964 | Analogico
	Edizione CD		Decca "Legends" | 458 622-2 | (1 CD) | durata 54' 01" | (c) 2001 | ADD (96kHz 24-bit)
	Note		(c) 1964, The Decca Record Company Limited, London

All that apparently survives of Mahler's juvenilia, apart from fragmentary sketches, is a complete opening movement of a Piano Quartet in A minor (wich was first performed of the WBAI radio station of New York in 1961) and three complete songs with piano - Im Lenz, Winterlied and Maitanz im Grünen (wich remain in private hands, and still await performance). There is also a discarded first part of the cantata Das klagende Lied (the first to be composed of Mahler's published compositions); this was first performed on the BRNO Radio in 1934. But no trace has been discovered of any early attempt by Mahler at symphonic composition. Yet it seems certain that Mahler's first published symphony - No. 1 in D - cannot have been the first that he composed. Memories have survived of a symphony being rehearsed by the students orchestra of the Vienna Conservatoire, while Mahler himself was still a student there; of three movements of a youthful Symphony in A minor (the finale was apparently complete in the young composer's head, but was never committed to paper); of an early "Nordic Symphony"; and of 'two other symphonies'. It was long assumed that these and any other symphonic products of Mahler's teens in the eighteen-seventies were destroyed by him; but there is reason to believe that some of them, at least, survived his death in 1911. In 1938, the distinguished Mahler-biographer Paul Stefan, who had known the composer, wrote an article for the magazine Musical America (issue of April 10). In this he stated that the great conductor and Mahler-protegé Willem Mengelberg had told him that he had discovered the manuscripts of 'four complete symphonies of Gustav Mahler's youth' in the archives of the Weber family in Dresden (Mahler was on intimate terms with the Webers during the years 1886-88); and that he had actually played them over on the piano with the composer Max von Schillings during an all-night session. Stefan described all this as having happened 'some time ago' - it must have been before 1933, the year in which Von Schillings died - but nothing further has been heard of these symphonies. Stefan died in 1943 and Mengelberg in 1951 - both before the sudden re-awakening of interest in Mahler in the 'fifties - and recent searching has so far failed to reveal the whereabouts of the manuscripts in a much - changed post-war Germany. It may be that they were destryed by the then Baroness von Weber (Who has also since died), as according to Stefan she had promised Mahler to prevent them from ever being performed. The Mahler-enthusiast can only hope against hope that these scores will eventually come to light. Although they would no doubt be too immature to enter the repertoire, they would nevertheless illuminate the, at present, obscure path traversed by the young Mahler's musical imagination, on its way towards the fantastically original 'Symphony No. 1 in D' of which he conducted the stormy première in Budapest in 1889. For fantastically original the work is, a fact we should not forget now that it is becoming such a familiar part of our musical experience. Mahler's youth ful scores might reveal, in the first place, the steps by which he came to score for such a large orchestra - for this seems to have been an entirely original departure on his part. Richard Strauss, in the first masterpiece Don Juan (first performed, also under its composer, just nine days before Mahler's First Symphony), was for the time being quite happy with the usual triple woodwind, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and bass tuba. Bruckner, in his Seventh Symphony of four years earlier, had admittedly begun to call for the extra four horns doubling tenor tubas which Wagner had demanded for The Ring; but he had otherwise remained content with normal forces, even settling for the modest double woodwind of earlier tradition. It seems to have been Mahler who first used practically the full Ring orchestra of Wagner for a symphonic work - quadruple woodwind, eight horns (but not doubling tenor tabas, as with Wagner and Bruckner), four trumpets, Three trombones and bass tuba - as well as asking for a second timpani player. He did so, of course, not to achieve the extra solemnity of Bruckner, or the extra sumptuousness of the later Strauss, but to produce that sharply-etched clarity - shrill woodwind, whooping horns, biting brass - which is the essence of his orchestral style. From Mahler's student symphonies we might also expect to trace the origins of the startling stylistic innovations which he brought into the symphony. The sudden unheard-of appearance of a bird-call in the slow introduction, for example (that of the cuckoo), or the unprecedented use of 'pop-music' elements: the café-music schmalz of the Scherzo's Trio, the zigeuner tear-jerking and vulgarity which intrude into the Funeral March - not to mention the simple writing-out of the familiar round on 'Frère Jacques' (or rather on its German minor-key equivalent, 'Bruder Martin'), and the scoring of the result in the most macabre colours, as the main basis of the Funeral March itself. Even more, from a study of those vanished scores, we might be able to watch the growth of the formidable structural grasp which enabled Mahler to integrate such a mass of heterogeneous elements into a symphonic whole - and particularly his power to set two violenty contrasted tonalities at each other's throats without bursting the form apart at the seams. The wildly desparing F minor music which breaks into the D major pastoral geniality of the First Symphony's opening movement, and which takes complete charge of the first half of its eventually triumphant D major finale, presents an individual type of schizophrenic key-conflict which is only contained and eventually resolved by the sureness of the unusually far-flung structure. Such phenomenal architectural power in a first symphony argues a long and arduous apprenticeship, which may well have needed at least four student works to complete. Deryck Cooke