Gielen unleashes the music’s colourful excesses

the Berliners play with impressive breadth, a trademark of Tennstedt’s Mahler both live and on record.

In this fabulously executed account, all lead inexorably toward the apocalyptic nightmare world of the Rondo-Finale, Mahler’s most avant-garde music: never more “contemporary” in its sound than Gielen makes it here.

It provides a demonstration of what a fine Mahler interpreter he is...With the Berlin Philharmonic playing wonderfully for him, Gielen typically keeps everything on a short leash, with brisk tempi that give the music few opportunities to wander off track, and all its detail very precisely etched.