When earlier this year Bernard Haitink completed his stint at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, there was some surprisingly mean-spirited press comment, a tendency to take for granted the gravitas and sense of continuity he brought to mainstream repertoire - above all perhaps to Wagner - in difficult and dangerous times. I say this in part because I have never entirely understood the high esteem in which his Mahler is held in the UK. In the 1960s, it was different, and Haitink's sane, lucid, sometimes (as it now seems) insufficiently demonstrative Concertgebouw LPs represented a way into music previously considered beyond the pale. Haitink then stood for classical values as opposed to the affecting (and, in this work, funereal) subjectivity of a Barbirolli. When Haitink revisited the Sixth with the Berlin Philharmonic (Philips, 4/91 - nla), it was generally felt that his phrasing had lost some of its appealing natural simplicity. Or perhaps it was simply that we no longer needed his rhythmic almost-squareness to provide reassurance.

The present performance, captured live at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées by Radio France, retains much of the dour, monolithic tone of that Berlin reading and will not please those who think the score is ultimately about the irreconcilability of opposites. Conjuring commanding, mahogany sonorities from an orchestra that usually sounds bass-light however personable its winds, Haitink has expunged all but a very few pockets of blurred articulation. He sets less store by the meaningful elucidation of detail. Hence the scherzo is a little bland, lacking the edge of caricature that alone can justify it being placed second, while the low-key slow movement includes some oddly prosaic solo playing. Breaking with tradition, the first movement is shorn of its exposition repeat. All of which throws particular weight onto the finale, in which the conductor is generally agreed to excel.

Given that the Sixth was not heard at all in France until 1966, the self-confident rigour of this music-making is fairly remarkable. But then French orchestral playing has transformed itself in recent years and Mahler has become a popular mainstay throughout Europe. Successfully handled as it is here, live recording can bring a keen sense of concentration sustained over a long span. Only don't expect the usual thrills and spills - that is not the conductor's way. I should mention two minor problems. First, there's the disconcertingly immediate applause at the end which shatters the mood. Second, there's Naïve's trendy presentation, seemingly so at odds with Haitink's public persona: the tableau of (Balkan?) refugees was presumably inspired by the Tragique subtitle which Bruno Walter at least held to be Mahler's own. For the mainstream collector, Bernstein and Karajan retain their best buy status. But no more distinguished account of a Mahler symphony has ever reached us from Paris.