Mahler’s First Symphony was composed in 1888, just three years after Brahms’ Fourth and final symphonic utterance – a work itself notable, especially by Brahms’ standards, as remarkably forward-looking.

While perusing a few LP versions of the Mahler in my collection, I was bemused to read in the liner notes of one that Mahler’s First doesn’t contain “anything radical”.

To my mind, it’s probably the most original and radical first symphony ever composed, by anyone, even Beethoven.

Simone Young conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Mahler 1. Photo supplied

Mahler began as he meant to go on. Both central movements here feature parodies, which were to become a recurrent theme of his later symphonies. In the second movement, there is a virtual send-up of a traditional Austrian peasant dance surrounding a somewhat tipsy Viennese waltz. In the third, a parody within a parody, with the main theme, Frère Jacques, played in a minor key as a funeral march for a hunter (accompanied by the animals he hunted!)

Mahler also displayed an uncanny, albeit unconscious, far-sightedness. In the central part of the third movement, the klezmer (Jewish street music) sounds like something composed by Kurt...