Mahler Symphony No. 5

Reference Recordings Latest Release from Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra

Reference Recordings has just released its latest recording of The Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles. Two years ago RR brought out a musically and sonically superb set of all five Beethoven piano concertos with the great Garrick Ohlsson as soloist and Runnicles his fully sympathetic partner (see my TAS review here: https://referencerecordings.com/the-absolute-sound-gives-five-stars-to-garrick-ohlssohns-complete-beethoven-piano-concertos/). Like that recording, this Mahler Fifth originates from two concerts at the annual Grand Teton Music Festival, now in its 65th year, at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this time from July 2024.

A full review will follow soon—until then this capsule: All praise, first, to GTMF music director Runnicles, who coaxes playing of astonishing unanimity, virtuosity, and sheer beauty (ravishing in the adagietto) of what is essentially a pickup orchestra, albeit of cream-of-the-crop players. The Fifth may be the most difficult to conduct of all the composer’s symphonies owing to its length and tempestuous, ever-changing character: three parts encompassing five movements that go from death to heroic anguish to wildly mercurial scherzo to heartfelt love song to exuberant final rondo. Runnicles’s powerful command of long-range structure and his always alert shaping of the individual movements, with their radically abrupt shifts of mood and temperament, are second to none: I cite the dazzlingly shifting perspectives on Ländler and Viennese waltzes in that fantastic scherzo (one of Mahler’s supreme achievements in symphonic form), or the final rondo, the most joyous music the composer ever wrote. A fabulous performance in superlative sound.