“It has turned out to be so overwhelming – as though it flowed out of me like a mountain stream!” After four years of work, Gustav Mahler was euphoric when he completed his first symphony in 1888. He revised it over the next eleven years in the course of the first performances, however, until it was published in 1899 – a monumental achievement that was to have a profound impact on the symphonic works of the 20th century. Characteristic are the extremely complex material – drawn from a wide variety of sources, from folksong melody to complex polyphony – expansive melodic lines and tremendous intensifications with sudden breaks, alternation between the extremes of intimate chamber music and eruptive orchestral sound, reflection and naïveté, euphoria and preoccupation with death. Alexander Joel and the Brunswick State Orchestra relentlessly explore these extremes on their new CD. Even today, Mahler’s First Symphony is an unsettlingly intense experience.