Hard on the heels of a sophisticated Fifth on the “own label” of his other orchestra (RCO Live, 12/08), Mariss Jansons directs a rather more urgent Seventh for the new BR-Klassik series. It is a work he must like – Simax has an Oslo relay in preparation too – but the extreme brilliance of both playing and conception comes at a price. While the audience response as preserved on disc is ecstatic, music that peers into the expressionist abyss risks here being turned into a concerto for orchestra. A certain irony there. Mahler’s Seventh was long considered difficult. Bruno Walter, the composer’s own protégé, conducted it twice in March 1920 and never touched it again. Yet these days the sinew and sense of struggle is being airbrushed away, an effect which may or may not be enhanced by Reinhold Kubik’s new scholarly critical edition which Jansons has pioneered. There must be a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

With everything so pacy and spruce a few oddities stick out. Jansons makes a big thing of the brief bars of dirge-like material which delay the first movement’s clinching peroration. The central Scherzo lacks the nightmarish quality promoted by most Mahlerians although it is finely articulated. The finale is breathtaking as a piece of orchestral alchemy, winds and brasses blending seamlessly into virtuoso and lustrous strings. Except that Jansons’s junketing feels strangely drained of parody. The discontinuities are handled so effortlessly that this is no longer, in Henry-Louis de La Grange’s words, “music presciently conscious of the malaise of our age” in which everything has its price and nothing is quite what it seems.

The recorded sound is state-of-the-art, at least until the rather muted bells at the very end. The provision of pictures is generous, the use of gold positively rococo. As for the competition, Barenboim’s Berlin Staatskapelle offers old-school warmth, Zinman’s Tonhalle the kind of central reading that will not spoil you for more adventurous variants. If you don’t mind their dated sound, Abbado and Bernstein present edgier (more Mahlerian?) sonorities with a greater sense of symphonic purpose. Jansons has different priorities and convinced admirers need not hesitate.