The games composers play: inviting us to join the fun and think about them is a strong suit for Sir Simon Rattle. In an anniversary cycle of Mahler performances spread across 2010 11, he paired the symphonies in characteristically stimulating ways – the Fifth with Purcell, the Eighth with Tallis, the Ninth with Lachenmann. While in the First Symphony Mahler deliberately creates a world (‘of coming into consciousness’, remarks Rattle in an interview at the BPO’s Digital Concert Hall), Rachmaninov’s last work renews his own by revisiting old tropes and rejecting others. From the carefully described arc of introduction, through emphatic strings, perfectly articulated (and balanced in the mix) timpani and bass drum punctuation to the thundering train of the main theme with a heavily marked pulse, these Symphonic Dances (Philadelphia, 1940) seem as much a product of their time and place as Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements (Columbia, 1942 45) and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (New York, 1943), and indeed as much of a three-movement symphony as Debussy’s La mer. It’s an obsessively dark interpretation, haunted in the second movement by timbral echoes of La valse and the Nachtmusik movements of Mahler’s Seventh. I also read a meta-narrative here of Rachmaninov withholding the big tune. The ‘Dies irae’ is not celebrated but emerges from the texture as inevitably as the Eroica’s Funeral March does in Metamorphosen. What a retort the tam-tam’s final laissez vibrer makes to his previous closures, as well as the strongest possible invitation not to burst into applause, and Rattle holds the moment as long as he dare.

The Mahler is born slowly, more tenderly even than under Harding (RCO Live, 4/13) or Abbado (EuroArts), both of whom are no less alive than Rattle to its many structural quirks and novel ideas of what it takes to make a symphony. Tennstedt (EMI) and Bernstein (DG) bring their own specially rambunctious authority to the work, especially when seen as well as heard, but not only do Rattle and Abbado allow you to hear farther inside the score, they cultivate a warm, woody glow that helps to show how the symphony is closer (and not only in time) to Brahms’s Fourth than Mahler’s Ninth. The ironies of the middle movements are gently done, the finale’s triumph not blaring but grandly affirmative in a way that, as Rattle remarks, Mahler would never recover. It was shown in cinemas in 2011; the Blu-Ray offers the original’s 3D depth of field for those with the kit.