The biggest surprises of Mahler’s second, 1893 version of his first symphonic masterpiece…are the touches of orchestration later changed, usually for the better…Roth’s punchiness is probably appropriate to the original; nothing drags.

The recording sticks a feather in the cap of Les Siècles, among the most adaptable and engaging of today’s historically informed ensembles formed in the image of their director… I applaud, too, Roth’s unabashed commitment to those passages where Mahler himself later had second thoughts – deft and ingenious ones, to be sure, but thinning out its red blood cells in the process.. a required supplement to any decent-size Mahler library.

If you're at all interested in orchestration then it's fascinating to be able to see the hundreds of tiny changes that Mahler made, and, in conjunction with this wonderful recording, to hear the impact that they make on the mood and emotion of the piece…The more incisive attack and articulation of the gut strings combined with the smaller bore of the brass instruments reveals one of this performance's major virtues: you can hear a wealth of detail in Mahler's string writing that often gets buried under loud brass chords.

The references to Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann in Mahler’s First only make it sound more revolutionary, and never more so than in this exhilarating account by Roth’s brilliant period-instrument band, whose woodwind and brass are playing on Austro-German instruments.