Rattling good Mahler

By WILLIAM DART

Simon Rattle marks his taking over of the Berlin Philharmonic with a live recording of Mahler's Fifth - and EMI has achieved wonders in getting the CD out within a few months of the August concert.

"Anyone can write a book," Mahler wrote of this work, "but a musical score is like a book with seven seals. Even the conductors who can decipher it present it to the public swathed in their own interpretations."

The composer need not have anguished here - Rattle is the Mahler maestro. The English conductor knows how to negotiate the balancing of earthy and sentimental, of filigree chamber music and blistering climaxes. Being a live recording, it's understandable that the brass take a few pages to warm up, but apart from this it's a performance to leave both Mahlerians and stereo buffs loose-jawed with admiration.

In its more extrovert moments, it storms with the best of them; when it pulls back to a handful of players, you feel you're on the stage with them. (No, that's not an Austrian woodpecker at the end of the first movement, but the tap tap tap of the col legno strings.)

The Adagio, which stretches to as long as 13'55" in Haitink's lugubrious 1988 recording, is a spruce 9'28".

It's not the shortest version ever - my Bruno Walter 1947 recording shaves it down to 7'43" - but few can match the translucence and light here, as strings give out what was Mahler's love song to his wife, Alma, over floating harp notes.

At one point, in just a few bars, we seem to make a journey from Verklarte Nacht to Der Rosenkavalier.

While this superlative Mahler recording is available locally, John Adams' Naadiïve and Sentimental Music is an import available through specialist dealers. And it's worth seeking out.

Adams, the man who made a heldentenor out of Mao Zedong in his opera Nixon in China, is the thinking person's minimalist; the title of his new orchestral work, a symphony in all but name, takes its inspiration from Schiller.

Like Mahler, Adams walks the fine line between corn and class.

If you let yourself enter his mesmerising world, you could find yourself hooked on the melodic trail of the first movements like Hansel and Gretel following pebbles out of the forest.

The second movement is a lighter-than-air Adagio (imagine Bach writing his Air on the G string for the Californian open spaces), and the third could be retitled "Mahler meets Minimalism".

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic give it all they've got, which is considerable, and Nonesuch does them proud on the recording side, making these two CDs the perfect symphonic companions.

* Mahler, Symphony No 5 (Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic), EMI Classics 557385 2; Adams, Naive and Sentimental Music (Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), Nonesuch 79636.