Right from the start, with those dark, dragging rhythms, there's a sense that something special is afoot here. Driven and grittily intense though his direction often is, it isn't ruthless. …I can't think of another recording of this symphony that not only brings so many of its extraordinary features to life, but ultimately balances them so satisfyingly.

a performance of the Seventh Symphony as cohesive and powerful as I can remember. This was a blinder from start to finish …

For some Valery Gergiev's dark, pumped-up Seventh might prove to be the high-point of his Mahler cycle. True, the over-the-barricades manner precludes much in the way of subtlety but it does hold in tight unity a score that can sprawl into incoherence. Much is paced a notch faster than usual, though not the introduction which is spacious and strong. The playing is consistently assured; the sound powerfully immediate. The reading has a monolithic drive that is nothing if not distinctive.
What Gergiev doesn't deliver is a sense of this music's teeming inner life. No point looking here for either Claudio Abbado's delicate attention to line and colour or Leonard Bernstein's emotive, micro-managed rubato. Gergiev's inner movements come across as diligent but brusque.
While his idiosyncratic seating arrangements (including antiphonal violins) make for some interesting effects, it's the resilience of the LSO brass at high decibels you're likely to remember, not the meaningful interplay of independent and interdependent strands.
The applause which greeted this performance at London's Barbican Hall has been surgically removed for this hybrid SACD incarnation.
The critics will be as divided over its merits as they were following the live performance.
Happily, LSO Live's competitive pricing means you can decide for yourself.

Valery Gergiev's dark, pumped-up Seventh might prove to be the high-light of the cycle … it holds in tight unity a score that can sprawl into incoherence.The playing is consistently assured; the sound powerfully immediate

Valery Gergiev treats [the Seventh Symphony] as an exercise in orchestral virtuosity that primarily strives for effect rather than attempting to explore underlying substance. It's thrillingly played, but Gergiev's speeds are at times self-consciously extreme. A sense of garbled excitement pervades the outer movements, which could do with more consideration and shape. The morbid central scherzo and the two nocturnes that frame it are more adroitly done: the second nocturne is sexy as well as ironic, which makes it very unsettling.

In glossing over the leering monsters of this gilt ballroom of sound, Gergiev finds a more or less cohesive - if not always satisfying - epic thread, although the central Scherzo still rebels. Gergiev and a lively LSO sweep up the finale bells and whistles with exhilarating energy.