We have Mahler’s twin anniversary years to thank for the latest wave of concert recordings. Here two of today’s most perspicacious music directors tackle what was once reckoned an implausibly gruelling assignment even by the composer’s disciples. Attitudes have changed but controversies remain, principally over the running order of the middle movements. Mahler wrote the symphony with the Scherzo placed before the slow movement, then switched the order and, as is now clear, never reverted to the original sequence in performance. Antonio Pappano and Esa-Pekka Salonen nevertheless put the Scherzo first, a decision buttressed by Julian Johnson’s booklet-note for Signum (even if he implies that all three hammer-blows will be heard in the finale). Both readings also observe the first-movement exposition repeat and have had the concluding applause lopped off.

In other respects they are worlds apart. Salonen famously began his relationship with the Philharmonia as a late stand-in conducting Mahler’s Third in 1983: he was then still in his twenties and more composer than maestro. Recently, as the ensemble’s chief, he has returned to Mahler in the context of a concert series surveying the emergence of musical modernism in Vienna, ‘city of dreams’. In showing how Mahler opens the door to new possibilities, Salonen’s approach is consistently hard-edged and unfussy, although he will occasionally take a passage haltingly as if intensifying the gloom – this happens just before the first movement’s less-than-wholly euphoric dash to the finishing line. Admirers of Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated recordings will probably find Salonen too cool and it is true that his Los Angeles sojourn would seem to have impacted on his composing more than his conducting. Structural coherence remains the prerequisite of the latter: ‘if you stop for too long to smell the flowers along the road then you lose sight of the goal’. Rubato is carefully rationed, which makes much of the score turn mechanistic and dark. The Andante alone seems rather pale; the finale is uncommonly cogent.

Coming to the orchestral scores via longer acquaintance with the vocal music, Pappano prefers a more emotive style, with variously blended textures and a bigger string sound. Marginally slower tempi necessitate a split between discs. Pappano plainly has a congenial venue: Salonen’s Royal Festival Hall imparts a certain thinness of string tone and bluntness of timbre whereas EMI’s production has the opulence associated with studio efforts.

The big question is whether either account deserves to find an audience beyond the committed pool of concert attendees and/or fans of the man up front. Salonen’s dour conception is unmistakably the product of our own times. Pappano’s, with vocal exhortations from the podium and bronchial noises off, is comfort-blanket-romantic in its optimism and emotional openness.

Both orchestras are on fine form in their different ways. The gulf between them is most obvious in explicitly evocative passages. Take the rural idyll at the heart of the first movement (for all that the Italian cowbells are reticent) or the characterisation of the Trio in the second where Pappano’s treatment is that much more blatant. His slow movement is predictably warmer in feeling while his finale depicts a protagonist in love with life who won’t admit defeat until the very end. If you hear Mahler in terms of direct expressive communication rather than aesthetic novelty, you will find this version easier to love.