Segerstam lends a keen, composerly ear to this startling score, delighting in the invention, the textural detail and colour as only a composer/ conductor can. He doesn't always hit the mark, but he is never far wide of it. So where are the real problems? Primarily, I suspect, with his orchestra. They are good, often very good, but where the superhuman is called for, where two string orchestras will do better than one (and that's fairly often in this piece), the Danish National simply don't have the necessary reserves. For all that Chandos flatter them hugely (this Danish Radio coproduction is characteristically imposing), you feel the deficiency in string tone from the very start: Segerstam's middle-road tempo needs to carry far more weight and penetration, a dark, drenching sound; there must be greater contrast between the infernal marching machine and Alma's alleviating light as that second subject sweeps in. Then again, the sensitivity and depth of Segerstam's work is immediately apparent in moments of repose. He always finds the space Mahler needs: those moments alone high above the hurly-burly (the heart of the movement with its shepherd's pipes and cow-bells) are most tenderly expressed, the rubato free but never mannered. The returning march may be heartless but here Segerstam delights in the extrovert colorations: Mahler never used the tuba more adventurously and Segerstam is right there, relishing the dinosaur-like bellowing (21'55''); likewise the tattoos of percussion and shrill woodwinds.
The tonal grotesqueries are again well exploited in the Scherzo (the ''Landler danced by ogres''), particularly in the bass woodwinds and again the tuba as Fafner comes out of the forest at 6'54''. Horns might generally have been stretched a little more here, but Segerstam is well on top of the style, indulging the distortions of phrase in both trios to the manner born. He displays an easy mobility in the Andante—lovely muted half-shades here with glissandos as fragile and as tenuous as the serenity of the movement itself. In the opening pages of the finale—which I have described on more than one occasion as a kind of ''cosmic limbo''—you must turn to Bernstein (DG) to hear how this unique music can sound. It is Bernstein, too, who gives us the density and weight and sheer unhinged terror of this movement. Segerstam knows where to lay on the rhetoric and I appreciate the way in which he holds back nervously in the approach to each of Mahler's hammer blows (all three in this instance), as if bravely resolving to confront the inevitable. The second, with added tam-tam, is terrifying, far greater than the first (he conveys well this mounting anxiety) and no holds are barred by his splendid trumpets and trombones. Horns are again disappointing, deficient in key moments, and the strings, as I say, haven't the ballast really to seethe in the biggest tuttis. Even so, I would feel gratified hearing such a performance in the concert-hall; aspects of Segerstam's reading are not quickly forgotten—like the threnody for trombones in the coda: how eloquently he and his players pay their respects.
The fascination of one composer for another is again communicated in Segerstam's reading of Todtenfeier—though as a performance I have to say it lacks electricity, a sense of daring comparable to the music. Even so, one can share his fascination for this great movement in the making (i.e. the first movement of the Second Symphony). He knows, one senses, how flawed it is structurally; he also knows what it will become, indeed how much more extraordinary it is in some ways than the infinitely more accomplished but less radical finished product. He accentuates the oddities, he makes no attempt to paper over the cracks, particularly in the protracted and dislocated development (the source of most that is different about this earlier version). That remains the single most fascinating insight into the mind and spirit of the far-seeing adventurer who was eventually to give us the Sixth.'