While the Berlin Philharmonic’s Bruckner tradition began to be documented in the 78 era, with Jascha Horenstein conducting the Seventh in 1927, Mahler’s music took much longer to establish itself, due more to the predilections of its music directors than the changing fortunes of the composer’s reputation. The BPO’s first official recording of the First, for example, dates from as recently as 1987, the Second from 1993, the Third from 1990, all made with Bernard Haitink for Philips; all glamorous but neutral, none of them striking improvements on the conductor’s first recorded thoughts from Amsterdam.

Before Karajan began to document his selective engagement with the instrumental symphonies, the BPO invited John Barbirolli to show them the Mahlerian ropes, in concerts latterly released by Testament and on a celebrated if wayward EMI studio recording of the Ninth. Only with Claudio Abbado’s tenure, however, did the music really enter the BPO’s bloodstream and repertoire – so much so that when Simon Rattle took over in 2001, he declared he would give them a break. However, he had second thoughts of his own to record, firstly towards the end of his contract with EMI and then in a complete cycle staged to mark the centenary of the composer’s death in 2011 – which is where this box comes in.

In the Eighth from that cycle, Rattle sharpened contrasts and characters over his EMI recording (4/05). A stronger, more naturally recorded cast of soloists features Johan Botha conquering the near-impossible demands of Dr Marianus. What the choral forces lack in sheer numbers they more than make up in projection. Here and throughout the set, the CD remix scores over the sound balance on film; applause is also eliminated on CD. At the same time, subtly managed transitions (into ‘Infirma nostri corporis’) and articulations (the Mater gloriosa’s call from on high) have jumped the shark from ‘subtle’ to ‘knowing’. For me, at least, it’s a bit much, yet not enough.

In much the same way as the orchestra’s portmanteau Bruckner cycle (3/20), the performances of Nos 1 5 also press harder and cut deeper than their conductors’ recorded versions outside Berlin: an impression perhaps exaggerated by the high-definition sound. In Mahler, though, is that always a good thing? I preferred the softer contours and more restrained ebb and flow of Daniel Harding’s First in the Concertgebouw’s own multi-conductor Mahler cycle (4/13), and the less self-consciously semplice quality of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s previous version of the Fourth from Montreal (ATMA).

The Second under Nelsons is even more literally vivid and spiritually disengaged than his Salzburg Festival account with the VPO (8/19). Both the depth of the Berliners’ string sound and their collective virtuosity seem to seduce Gustavo Dudamel into a picaresque riot of rubato and portamento, pushing the already heterogeneous elements of the Third and Fifth to the edge of self-parody. Unlike Bruckner, more like Berlioz, Mahler was writing for an orchestra of soloists, and it is the personalities of first horn Stefan Dohr, timpanist Reiner Seegers and violinist Kolja Blacher who take centre stage through the course of the set; as when watching McKellen’s Iago and Magneto, you become aware that Dohr (among others) is playing himself as well as the role outlined by the notes in front of him.

The set picks up with a refreshingly unmannered Sixth of fierce concentration under Kirill Petrenko. I love its goal-directed quality, not only within Mahler’s autobiographical narrative but a longer story of his place in history. In the recitatives preparing the finale’s main action, a cloud of harp, celesta and bells abruptly prefigures the Orchestral Pieces of Schoenberg and Webern. Thinning out the texture and keeping those Berlin strings on a tight leash brings Hindemith and Weill to mind. Placed second, the Andante smiles without irony, before the Scherzo bursts in with a lurid savagery to rival anything in Prokofiev and Shostakovich. For its comparably far-sighted vision over the symphony at the centre of a chain reaction (a theme of Barbara Vinken’s booklet essay, which sees Mahler as a contemporary of Braque and Pound in this regard), Rattle’s Seventh from 2017 is also worth returning to, an interpretation refined over the years but (unlike the Eighth) with no commensurate loss of impact.

Bernard Haitink’s way with the Ninth evolved markedly over the years. By December 2017, the first three movements had acquired a flinty patience in the face of adversity, sharing the resolute spirit of his latter-day accounts of Bruckner’s Ninth. The Adagio, however, opens out into the kind of multifaceted radiance that touched his farewell performances of Bruckner’s Seventh with sublimity. Here I feel the orchestra giving him back something of their own history in the piece, from Barbirolli and Klemperer to Bernstein and Karajan, then his contemporary, Abbado.

Which brings the set full circle, to the Adagio of the Tenth from 2011, in one of their former chief’s final concerts with them: a world of pathos away from his DG recording in Vienna, also from the younger generation of conductors in the first half of the cycle. While emerging from the Ninth’s extinction as though no other music was possible, the exquisite restraint of the opening phrase led me in one direction, soon to be swept in another by the burning line of Abbado’s direction. After almost a year of quarantine, of not holding my ears to account in the concert hall where the overwhelming climaxes and aspirations of this music find a more fitting home, I wondered if Mahler just isn’t my idea of lockdown music. In truth, he isn’t, or not as a symphonist. The lieder speak more directly than ever; and if the BPO have a Mahler song collection in mind, including Abbado’s Das Lied von der Erde which the Tenth prefaced in concert (von Otter and Kaufmann the soloists), then we shall be the richer for it.