London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev - Mahler: Symphony No. 1 (2008)

When Gustav Mahler began his First Symphony in 1884, ‘modern music’ meant Wagner, while the standard by which new symphonies were judged was that of Brahms, the arch ‘classical-romantic’. In a Brahmsian symphony there was little room for Wagnerian lush harmonies, or sensational new orchestral colours. In fact the orchestral forces Brahms employed were basically the same as those used by Beethoven and Schubert in their symphonies, three-quarters of a century earlier.