It has become harder for interpreters to make their mark in what has become standard fare, yet both these conductors pull it off. Roger Norrington has long sought to give wider currency to his radical ideas about performance practice in the First. Meanwhile Michael Gielen has reversed his attitude to the nascent Tenth to present an intriguing realisation of Deryck Cooke’s performing version.

Gielen’s narrative is not invested with Rattle’s passion. He prefers to lay bare its gaunt, unfinished state, exposing even parts of the Adagio as the harmonic frame over which Mahler would have stretched more complex contrapuntal detail. No longer an inexorable meditation, the movement becomes rather an unfinished dialogue between arrest and movement. The orchestral sound is lean and light with some exceptionally hushed playing from the strings and no lack of exquisite detail. The transparency means that contested ingredients like the deployment of glockenspiel in the second movement and Cooke’s discarded side-drum and xylophone parts in the fourth really register. I’m not sure I have ever heard a more perfectly judged Purgatorio. The finale can be achingly tender but only where necessary. That great flute melody is almost plain as well as pure, but what care is lavished on the strings’ delicately nuanced response! Rattle goes for the opposite effect, the Berlin flautist floating his tone more poignantly, the strings avoiding the hint of sentimentality. Under Gielen the upward thrust of the heart-wrenching sigh concluding the work takes you by surprise: he has a way of foregrounding emotive detail before retreating to a more expository Klemperer-like stoicism.

Norrington’s current priorities are well known and applied with a certain rustic vigour; he even sings along. The effect of the vibrato-less strings, strategically seated, is often fresh and airy, their impact less attenuated than in the concert hall thanks to relatively close microphone placement. In a boisterous and varied slow movement Norrington allows a soupçon of colourising vibrato to the gypsy element yet prefers, bizarrely to these ears, the sound of an ill-tuned consort of viols to introduce the lyric middle section at 4’41”. More worryingly, the finale fails to live up to its thrilling opening, the (not very cumulative) final climax unconvincingly paced, although the final crotchet is for once unadulterated by added drumbeats. Blumine, slightly seedy-sounding, is placed second. You can always reprogramme it to the authentic oblivion that Mahler himself intended. Both these performers contribute helpful observations in the booklet-notes. Norrington’s recording was captured live with enthusiastic applause retained.