It is almost 40 years since the British musicologist Deryck Cooke introduced his "performing version" of Mahler's Tenth Symphony and there have been at least three other attempts at an alternative completion since. But Cooke's has remained the most authoritative. Some conductors have refused to have anything to do with the score, preferring to conduct only the first movement of the Tenth, which Mahler completed before his death. But the younger generation, led by Riccardo Chailly and Simon Rattle, have been its consistent champions.
Chailly recorded the work while head of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and now he has introduced it to the Royal Concertgebouw. The orchestra with the finest Mahler pedigree in the world played the Tenth Symphony for the first time in June, and on Friday brought it to the Festival Hall.
When conducted by Chailly (and Rattle, too) the work is utterly convincing. OK, the second movement, the first of the two scherzos in the arch-like scheme, is weak. But then none of Mahler's symphonies (save possibly the Sixth) is free of weaknesses; that unevenness is part of his creativity.
The rest of the work has many extraordinary moments; it is a farewell to life (and Alma especially) as eloquent as the Ninth, yet different: far less resigned and far less comfortable.
Chailly always makes that edge of anger and despair tell. He times the first movement's climax in a screaming nine-note dissonance perfectly, gives the incessant central movement a terrifying inevitability, and unfolds the final pages of the symphony with ethereal tenderness. But he is not afraid to let the rough edges show, too, or to give the Concertgebouw's fabulous wind players licence to shape their solos.
Such a towering performance could have been savoured on its own, but there was also Mahler to begin the programme: the five Ruckert songs delivered with effortlessly-judged variation of colour and phrasing by the baritone Matthias Goerne. The way he darkened his voice for the final stanzas of "Ich bin der Welt" was a minor miracle in its own right.
Radio 3, Wednesday, 7.30pm.
