Scott Cantrell

Mahler's Fifth Symphony will be the party piece on Jaap van Zweden's first Dallas concerts, Sept. 10-14, as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. (He conducted the DSO in the piece last month at the Festival del Sole in Napa Valley, Calif.)

A new CD captures a live-concert Mahler Fifth that Mr. van Zweden led in January with the London Philharmonic. And judging from the roaring, whistling ovation at the end, the Royal Festival Hall audience was whipped into a frenzy.

With a couple of reservations, it's the kind of performance you'd expect from Mr. van Zweden, intensely disciplined, lovingly detailed and viscerally compelling. The horn-led scherzo has the loveliest gentle lilt, the famous Adagietto inhabits a ravishing dream world and the finale drives to a hair-raising close. The orchestra plays superbly, apart from a couple of spots where winds aren't flawlessly tuned – eight minutes into the first movement, for example.

For the most part, Mr. van Zweden's pacing is above reproach. But I'm not entirely convinced by tempos in the first and fourth movements.

The first is marked "Funeral march: With measured step. Strict. Like a cortege." Mr. van Zweden, like Leonard Bernstein in his 1963 New York Philharmonic recording, interprets the opening section at between 58 and 60 beats per minute – around the speed of a clock's second hand.

But, interestingly, there's a 1905 piano-roll recording of Mahler himself playing the movement – yes, on the piano – and he starts at a considerably brisker 72 beats per minute. There are questions about speed precision on piano rolls, but Mahler's performance was captured on the well-regulated Welte-Mignon system.

Mahler soon settles around 63 beats per minute, which is pretty much the tempo followed by his protégé, Bruno Walter, in a 1947 recording. The difference between 58 and 63 beats per minute may not sound like much, but it's the difference between dragging and direction. Personally, I can't quite get used to Mr. van Zweden's pace here.

Overall, Mr. van Zweden's timing for the movement is 13 minutes, virtually identical to Mahler's. But Mahler takes the fast parts of the movement more deliberately than Mr. van Zweden – and most other modern conductors.

The other reservation concerns the Adagietto, in recent decades often treated as an almost funereal lament. Mr. van Zweden's almost 10-minute timing is quicker than Bernstein's (11 minutes) or, heaven help us, the late Klaus Tennstedt's (11 minutes, 54 seconds).

But, according to written-down timings of his own performances, Mahler took the movement – a love offering, it turns out, to his young wife, Alma – in about eight minutes. Walter takes a mere seven minutes, 35 seconds.

Composers are not the last words on their own works. Subsequent interpreters bring insights and nuances the composers never imagined, with sometimes revelatory effect. But Mahler was one of the most famous conductors of his day, a man who in succession headed the Vienna Court Opera, Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic. His interpretive authority isn't easy to dismiss.

Still, Mr. van Zweden offers a deeply felt and splendidly played performance, and the engineers have captured natural sound in the acoustically refurbished London hall.Mahler

B+Symphony No. 5. London Philharmonic Orchestra, van Zweden (LPO)

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