Making a valid recording of the Seventh by Gustav Mahler places the most stringent requirements on the virtuosity of every individual musician in the orchestra. The task of bringing together the highly complex individual parts into a coherent whole – an undertaking that, when it succeeds, always has a a breathtaking effect, especially with Mahler – calls for a conductor capable of uniting the ensemble of individual solo-quality musicians into an overriding musical concept. Attesting to how convincingly Mariss Jansons and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks accomplished this feat at their Munich concert, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “We listened to an orchestra that had clearly reached the high point of its art.” The multi leveled, detail-rich score of this Mahler work – here in a recording based on the critical edition by the International Gustav Mahler Society – gains even more impact from the stunning technical reproduction using the high-definition SACD process. With his two grotesque “night music” sections, sounds of nature, naïve folk-tune motifs and trance-like orchestral tutti passages, the 7th Symphony is typical of Mahler’s sound world.