Mahler can be the most self-indulgent of composers, which means that his greatest interpreters are those who approach him with restraint and play this somewhat worrying trait down. Lorin Maazel comes close to excluding himself from their number through self-indulgences of his own.

Maazel is one of music's great showmen. Watching him conduct Mahler's Third Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra, you note the self-consciousness of his gestures. Sweeping around to the first violins, he overshoots his mark, so that both the gesture and the look of rapture on his face are addressed to the audience, effectively dictating our response.

Maazel has, however, always been a wizard when it comes to sonority. His intransigent interpretation of the Third proved doubly maddening because it was played with almost unspeakable beauty. The symphony attempts to portray existence in its entirety in a vision of a stratified cosmos with raw matter at its base and God at its apex. While Mahler is contemplating eternity, however, Maazel remains in a continuous present, and you lose sight of the symphony's architectonics.

The first movement depicts the vivification of inert matter, its shuddering phrases gradually assuming musical form as life takes shape. Maazel breaks it into a sequence of sonic blocks - impressive in themselves, but lacking cumulative meaning. It is a performance in which pauses proliferate, the most lethal coming before the beatific vision of the finale, undermining its impact.

Insights, when they come, are consequently temporary. Maazel is certainly aware of the danger as well as the glory in Mahler's cosmos; at one point he tellingly slows the second movement, which revels in the beauty of natural vegetation, to allow a wash of strings, woodwind and harps to recall the deadly charms of Wagner's flower maidens in Parsifal. For the Nietzsche setting that represents alienated man, Maazel chooses Dolora Zajick, better known as a player of Verdi. Her abrasive tone suggests prophetic urgency rather than world-weary reflection.

Individual moments, however, don't make a whole. Mahler's Third has, I suspect, rarely sounded so gorgeous - or meant so little.