One day in 1909, Mahler arrived at the new offices of his publisher in a terrible flap. He’d jumped off the tram before it came to a stop and dropped his marked-up proofs of the Eighth, which was promptly sliced in half under the tram-wheels. ‘Everything is ruined!’ he wailed to Alfred Kalmus, and was only pacified by the providential news that another copy of the proof had been made. Even so, he had to enter all the corrections over again.

Listening at points in these three new recordings, I wonder why he bothered. The nine-word expressive marking over ‘Imple superna gratia’ could be interpreted several ways – ‘same tempo but with a human face’ was Adám Fischer’s insight when we recently discussed the symphony (AVI Music, 12/19) – but what it surely doesn’t mean is ‘sit back and let the soloists take over’. Yet that’s exactly the effect of Gabriel Feltz pulling down a couple of gears in Dortmund, flipping the bird to Mahler’s insistent imprecations throughout the passage – ‘Don’t drag’, ‘Stay strictly in tempo’ – and therefore inevitably switching on the afterburners at exactly the point that Mahler instructs ‘always in tempo’.

Feltz is not alone. In the lengthy scene-setting to Part 2, Valery Gergiev reads the Poco adagio almost twice as fast as the same tempo marking for the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony. For all the fine, Impressionist detail of the Munich Philharmonic’s playing, the passage gains a Baroque jauntiness quite at odds with the dramatic context, also with the ultimate derivation of the principal theme from the opening sarabande chorus of the St Matthew Passion. Then there’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who evidently believes that the symphony’s apotheosis is not already quite loud enough and long enough. Again, so much for ‘don’t drag’ or ‘gradually pressing onwards’: this is exactly the Barnum-and-Bailey show that Mahler himself fretted over to Bruno Walter in advance of the Eighth’s much-touted premiere.

These are not passing issues, like a dropped note or missed entry, nor are they trivial or isolated examples, but conscious decisions that say, at this particular moment, the interpreter knows better than the composer. And perhaps they do. Mahler famously, if half-jokingly, suggested that his scores would need editing again every five years. As an opera conductor par excellence and inveterate tweaker, of his own music and other people’s, he knew that what works is what counts.

But still: Kubelík, Tennstedt and Boulez found their own subtle, musical solutions to these transitions, interludes and climaxes that breathe a spirit of recreative fidelity demanded by this of all Mahler’s symphonies. If, however, you’re prepared simply to enjoy the ride, then all three new performances have their attractions. Feltz has a superb team of soloists, well contrasted and all in form, who come into their own in the recitatives and ariosos of Part 2, sensitively recorded and accompanied with telling orchestral detail that entices me to explore the rest of a fairly under-reported cycle. The adult choirs, though, are simply too small (totalling 123 singers for the two groups) and too backwardly mixed – in soft more than loud sections – to carry through the composer’s promise of a truly vocal symphony.

Notwithstanding the vaunted acoustic of the Philharmonie de Paris, Gergiev’s performance is also more unevenly engineered – the soloists come and go, and Mahler’s reliance on the piano in the latter stages of Part 2 comes off badly – and much more rhythmically slipshod, with no safety net of other performances or recorded rehearsals. From a vocal line-up more impressive on paper than in the flesh, Jacquelyn Wagner’s Gretchen catches the ear most gratefully. If you can find the concert film on YouTube or MezzoTV, it comes off, just about, with a rough-and-ready sense of occasion.

Recorded four years ago, Nézet-Séguin’s performance is also a one-off, to judge from the cougher who ruins the pianissimo section of the Chorus mysticus despite the best efforts of the engineers. The soloists are pulled forwards for their solos and then discreetly recessed at climaxes, and time and care has been taken to balance the symphony to the advantage of its contrapuntal and expressionist details. I enjoyed the sensuous charm of ‘Jene Rosen’, the honeyed portamento of the Philadelphia strings – the performance took place almost a century to the day after Stokowski led the same orchestra in the US premiere – and more generally a tone of reassuring glamour reflected in the grand-operatic cast of soloists.

Were I recommending one of these versions for a newcomer to the piece, it would be Nézet-Séguin’s, but none of them answers the Eighth’s big questions or lives up to its extraordinary, multifarious character as well as its sometimes absurd ambitions. The symphony deserves better than a continual recourse to late maestros: try David Zinman on CD (Sony/RCA, 7/10) or Riccardo Chailly on film (Accentus, 1/12), both dedicated in their respect for the score, both overwhelming in their impact.