As the world and his wife know, Sir Simon Rattle marked his formal assumption of the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic with a series of remarkable concerts including Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. And EMI has not been slow to present us with the results. Few would deny that the relationship got off to a good start. But is the present package over-egging the pudding? The answer may depend on how you feel about viewing and reviewing concert footage, as opposed to filmed opera, on DVD.

Some background: EMI’s equivalent audio-only release (12/02) originally contained just the Mahler, captured over several days in Berlin and shorn of those final bravos; the performance has been reissued since in a limited edition that takes in a bonus CD of orchestral miniatures plus a revealing conversation with Nicholas Kenyon. Quite tempting. On the other hand, you’ll only find the Berliners’ brave stab at contemporary British music in the present format. And to have the DVD-Audio equivalent of the Mahler included as a bonus disc is generous indeed.

Rattle’s performance of the main work must be well known by now. More interventionist than some will like, whether militantly loud or exaggeratedly ethereal, it does bring a real sense of structural cohesion and an apposite lightness of touch to passages routinely overweighted in the great performances of the past. In the scherzo, the DVD format makes it easier to accept the front-stage placement of the obbligato horn – not, of course, a whim of Rattle’s but a decision based on precedent and scholarship. As sceptics like Klemperer and Scherchen might have observed, it doesn’t make the movement any shorter, yet Rattle feels he has cracked it after the initial doubts candidly discussed in the accompanying talk. A pity though to find him repeating the old canard that Leonard Bernstein took 14 minutes over the Adagietto. While I still feel that Claudio Abbado, for one, created more of a frisson at the start of that movement, the disappointment is only passing as Rattle’s music-making soon picks up emotive force. The finale, deft, vigorous and full of joy, is sure to impress.

Nor is there any doubting the energetic brilliance of Adès’s Asyla (the plural of ‘asylum’ used in both its meanings, as a place of refuge and of madness). For the uninitiated/unconvinced, it should help that the zany percussion effects can be seen as well as heard. The Berliners are encouraged to loosen up for its vernacular element, without perhaps plunging in quite as wholeheartedly as the audio-only CBSO (EMI, 7/99).

How to sum up? Though the orchestra might look less than obviously interactive with the animated figure on the podium, it is obvious that the team has worked hard to realise fresh expressive intentions with precise, never generalised playing. If you don’t instinctively recoil from the prospect of additional noises off and some rather insistent close-ups of the participants, a great occasion is well represented here. Surprisingly perhaps, the director does not zero in on the brass for their climactic chorale, giving us the orchestra in long-shot before Mahler’s – and Sir Simon’s – precipitate dash to the finishing line. The sound, not quite as clear as it might be in such densely scored passages, is still eminently acceptable; the images, as ever with this medium, are wonderfully crisp.