Mahler: Symphony No. 5 (Live)

Mariss Jansons, like his mentor Herbert von Karajan, came quite late to Mahler’s music, but he’s making up for lost time—this is already his second recording of the Fifth Symphony in 10 years. A live performance from 2016, it features his magnificent Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, an ensemble with a long Mahler tradition of its own. Jansons lavishes attention on every bar of this great score and keeps the intensity high, bringing out the work’s numerous shifts of mood, embracing sarcasm, wit, anger, and, in the glorious adagietto, radiant love.