Album: Mahler, Symphony No 1 - BFO/Fischer (Channel Classics)

Ivan Fischer's exhilarating recording of Mahler's First with the Budapest Festival Orchestra dispels the sick-room air that hung inevitably over last year's centenary commemorations.

Here, in the opening movement's daring invocation of Beethoven, in the whirling Ländler, and the third movement's brilliant burlesque of Yiddish folk-music, funeral march and military band, is a bold and vigorous voice, while the closing peroration is spine-tingling.