Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra & Sir Donald Runnicles: Mahler's Symphony No. 5
Reference Recordings

This June 2024 live recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor (1901–1902) sounds great, not just the inspired performance by the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra and its Music Director Sir Donald Runnicles but its presentation by producer Victor Muenzer and the Reference Recordings production team. Recording an orchestra in the studio has its share of technical challenges, but doing the same in a live context poses added complications when the possible intrusion of extraneous noises is factored in. It helps that The Walk Festival Hall in Teton Village, Wyoming has excellent acoustics; capturing that with fidelity in a recorded form still isn't easy, however.

That the orchestra sounds so cohesive is itself an accomplishment, considering that the musicians led by Runnicles at the festival come from over eighty-four orchestras and nearly seventy-two institutions of higher learning in North America and Europe. Admittedly, there's nothing revelatory about the interpretation Runnicles, who's held the title of Music Director at the festival since 2005, brings to the symphony, but it's also no crime for an interpreter to be faithful to a work and demonstrate an informed understanding of its essence. His guiding of the orchestra through the five movements is done with an assured and expert hand.

The premiere performance of the fifth, composed during a period when Mahler was recovering from a near-fatal illness and a decade before his 1911 death, was given in October 1904 in Cologne, Germany; more than 120 years later, the work has never been more popular, its familiarity with the general public enhanced by its exposure through the films Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) and Tár (Todd Field, 2022) and the affection for its “Adagietto.” While that close brush with death no doubt had an impact on the writing of the symphony, so too did his engagement to Alma Schindler and their 1902 marriage. The work ranges from despair, angst, and turmoil to joy, affirmation, and ecstasy using solely instrumental means, the first Mahler symphony to have done so since his first.

It also doesn't shy away from acknowledging death in opening with a funeral march or in beginning with (and returning to) a four-note figure that echoes the four-note ‘fate' motif from Beethoven's fifth symphony. While it might be the case that Mahler regarded his first movement as a lengthy introduction to its true opening, the second, the beginning part is no less essential to its character, especially in its funereal tone, dirge-like pace, and oscillation between lyrically aching episodes and explosive ones. Angst-ridden expressions emerge alongside desperately yearning and nostalgic passages, all such elements woven into a passionate fourteen-minute statement by Runnicles and the orchestra. They make good on the composer's instructions for the second movement with a treatment emblazoned with agitation and strife, though here again moments of calm and lyricism emerge to soften the blow and anticipate the serenity that the “Adagietto” will bring. Despite the preponderance of darkness and angst, moments of levity and triumph emerge during the movement too. Transitions between the symphony's dramatically contrasting moods are also effected fluidly by the performers such that shifts in tone never feel abrupt.

At the fifth's halfway point is a long-from “Scherzo” that infuses the work with the freshest of air and a rejuvenating spirit of optimism. Anxiety and turbulence are cast aside for eighteen minutes as the music relocates us to a resplendent garden of earthly delights and calms the nerves with a disarmingly gentle and intimate episode at its centre. The landscape changes conspicuously when the tender “Adagietto” strips the ensemble to strings and harp, the reduction tailor-made for sustaining a mood of celestial serenity across ten transporting minutes. Runnicles' pacing is exemplary, as is his carefully calibration of dynamics. The expression is passionate, but it's delivered with dignity without turning overwrought or bathetic. Opening radiantly, the fast-paced fifth movement ushers the work to a high-spirited close, its energy evoking the rejuvenating impact of the natural outdoors on the spirit.

July 2026