What a glorious prospect Mahler’s first major work opens up for us – and how beautifully it is realised here. The original three-part version of this ambitious folkloric cantata is like a musical manifesto of pretty well all Mahler to come. Horn calls in the prelude to “Waldmärchen” (“Forest Tale”) awaken his unique nature-world; elfin woodwind fanfares intimate martial music as far as the Seventh and Eighth symphonies; the First Symphony (third movement) is germinating at the close of part 1, the opening of the Second is already in place with the first bars of “Der Spielmann” (“The Wandering Musician”); and with “Hochzeitsstück” (“Wedding Feast”) Mahler seems to find himself in Act 2 of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung contemplating the opera he never wrote. But more startling than anything in Das Klagende Lied is Mahler’s feeling for, and command of, the orchestra – and this from a composer who’d never heard a note of his own orchestration.

Recorded in 1996, the reissue of this superbly engineered and vividly executed reading almost suggests that Tilson Thomas wants to give us the benefit of hindsight in evaluating it. With all the completed symphonies in his Mahler cycle now recorded (only the Eighth awaits release) the subtle detailing and nuancing of this performance indicates painstaking preparation but arrives in our living rooms sounding as if the ink is still wet on the page. Each repetition of that madrigal-like choral ritornello intensifies the lamentation of the title (the spell cast by that single phrase is something akin to the transcendency of the “Alleluias” in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms) until release is found in the anguish of the wronged queen and soprano Marina Shaguch hurls out her leaping vocal line to bring down the walls of the castle. That’s Mahler’s innate theatricality for you. Quite a piece, and quite a performance.