[2013 performance] This isn’t a slow march to nowhere. Once you adjust, you find yourself hearing Mahler’s music as Celibidache might
have conducted it. An extreme treatment matches extreme music. I was fascinated, frankly, and the excellent playing from the SWR Symphony, along with impeccable studio-quality sound, adds to the spell. Not only the final crack of doom but many passages along the way are shattering.

There is no shortage of poise or brilliance about the playing [in the 1986 performance], over and above the expected level of dedication which lends the performance a palpable sense of occasion...The 2013 concert is something else…Gielen holds the finale together with the kind of unfolding logic we might more readily associate with the Unfinished Symphony.

How fascinating to compare readings from the start of Gielen’s Mahlerian odyssey to its completion 42 years later.

The first, from 1971, is shimmering, vigorous and pretty good — but the second, from 2013, is the real deal: so slow, dark and heavy that it feels, by the end, truly like horror in sound.