Notwithstanding Richard Osborne’s less than enthusiastic words in the September issue, Michael Gielen’s 1993 recording of Mahler’s Seventh is generally rated among the best of the digital era. It is his 1981 account of No 8 that has tended to divide the critics. True, the conductor’s reputation as an unbending modernist might seem to sit oddly with the self-indulgence of a Symphony of a Thousand, but then neither of these caricatures quite rings true. On offer here is an entirely new version of the Mahler given in Freiburg in 1998. The unexpected and very generous coupling will be an incentive to some, but the package is likeliest to appeal to confirmed Gielen fanciers, already used to the kind of clipped delivery of the Latin text he favours in Mahler.

This is a fresh, vernal, unforced Eighth, worlds away from the blockbuster we have been used to from the likes of Sir Georg Solti. The vocal line-up is intriguing – partisans of Anthony Michaels-Moore and the tough-timbred Dagmar Pecková may be keen to explore their contributions – but when soloists are miked close, their inconsistencies are magnified. While Alessandra Marc makes some gloriously voluptuous sounds, many of her notes are approached from below. At the drop in tension for ‘Imple superna gratia’, the orchestra recedes into virtual inaudibility. The chorus doesn’t make much of the sudden unison on the first syllable of ‘Accende lumen sensibus’, four bars after fig 37, perhaps because Gielen sees it as having less motivic significance than the rest; he also eschews the gigantic ritardando into the recapitulation as favoured by conductors from Bernstein to Rattle (in live concert). Instead he aims for clarity of line, using his thin-toned South West German Radio forces to elucidate finer points of detail. Generally spacious tempi aside, grandiloquence is again kept at bay in Part 2. The lucidity remains impressive, only the self-effacing manner may disappoint in such a competitive field.

Written for the most part in 1917, a decade after Mahler worked on the Eighth, Die Jakobsleiter is not so much a makeweight as a companion piece. Schoenberg’s ambitions for his unfinished oratorio were comparably lofty after all. The archangel Gabriel is his protagonist, encountering a succession of human archetypes, all striving in suitably anguished manner along the path to spiritual transcendency. The setting offers varied and demanding work for the chorus and semi-choruses, interspersed with a series of taxing cameos for the soloists that culminates in a stratospheric soprano vocalise representing the soul freed of physical (and verbal) constraints. The score foreshadows much that was to come in Moses und Aron – in tone, in scale and, of course, in the thoroughgoing use of Sprechgesang – although it precedes the introduction of the 12-tone method. And yet, as so often with this composer, while its status as an object of historical interest is assured, the work has made slower progress in concert halls and recording studios since the belated première of the realisation by Winfried Zillig. Gielen’s main competitor is Boulez’s 1980 CBS version. Arnold Whittall suggested on first release (1/83) that ‘there was a touch of the workshop about the recorded result’ and the new performance can certainly be recommended as a viable alternative. The textures and rhetoric may be less clearly delineated than under Boulez, and Gielen’s predominantly American cast may impress a touch less than his rival’s mainly British soloists; Boulez also had Siegmund Nimsgern as a noble Gabriel. On the other hand, Gielen’s recorded sound is warmer (the venue makes a magically impressionistic wash of some passages that Boulez treats didactically), his tempi are generally brisker and Laura Aikin is a less problematic coloratura than the hard-working Mady Mesplé.

A final word of warning. The 75-page booklet provides annotations in four languages with David Hurwitz’s feisty defence of the Mahler confined to the English portion. There’s plenty of information about all the participants too. So how come the composers’ own texts go untranslated? Hurwitz for one assumes we have them! A stimulating package even so, and Die Jakobsleiter might even tempt a few listeners away from the saccharine excesses to be found on the Mahlerian path to spiritual redemption.