Summing up Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime concerts in Berlin (5/19) I found reason to refer to Michael Gielen’s valedictory appearance at the Salzburg Festival. Here it is, though had Furtwängler ever addressed himself to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, it’s a fair bet that it would have sounded nothing like this. Gielen came to believe that he (and presumably everyone else) had been conducting the symphonies much too quickly, and the first movement’s energico marking is experienced here, through the course of a patience-testing 28 minutes, less as a determined march past classical forms, face set against the wind, and more as a struggle between life and death, past and future, that counterbalances the vast narrative of the finale.

Stick with him. Gielen was far too canny a conductor to allow momentum to sag, and at any given moment he knew exactly which voice to highlight in Mahler’s panoptic canvas to lead the ear onwards. Even before he assumed directorship of the Baden-Baden and Freiburg orchestra in 1986 he had been working with them for decades, nurturing a Mahler tradition first established by their founding conductor, Hans Rosbaud. There is no shortage of poise or brilliance about the playing here, over and above the expected level of dedication which lends the performance a palpable sense of occasion. Try the horn solo floated over the ‘Alma’ theme (16'15") in the first movement’s Alpine interlude or the succeeding string tremolos where each change of harmony takes on a significance beyond the reach of more impetuous interpreters.

By 2013 Gielen had also changed his mind about the sequence of the middle movements, which now follow the increasingly orthodox ordering, backed by scholarship, of Andante-Scherzo. Not that this places the radio recording from 1971 in the shade. The earlier account is much rougher as well as swifter, with tempo contrasts inevitably compressed in the Scherzo, but the rubato and portamento warming the lyric themes here and in the Andante place the reading within a broad stream of Mahler performance flowing from Oskar Fried to Vladimir Jurowski.

The 2013 concert is something else. ‘Many a time a fragrance of ancestral Schubert rises from the deeps’, wrote the pianist-composer Zygmunt Stojowski in a 1916 tribute to Mahler, and it may seem paradoxical that it took modernists and fellow composers such as Bruno Maderna to fully grasp this aspect of his music. In doing so, Gielen raises the changing metres of the Scherzo above parody and holds the finale together with the kind of unfolding logic we might more readily associate with the Unfinished Symphony.

The booklet gives invaluable background to both performances, each of them quite different to the Sixth from 1999 previously published as part of a complete cycle from Hänssler (4/02). There is also a transcription and translation of the closing interview, though one needs no German to understand Gielen’s closing, sardonic laughter as both typical of the man and a Mahlerian gesture in its own right.