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You'd think Claus Peter Flor would be a dream conductor for Mahler. Principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra since 1999, the German maestro has led one white-hot performance after another at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. His combination of emotional intensity and finely gauged detail would seem made to order for the Austrian composer.

Mike Stone / Special to DMN

Claus Peter Flor beams at rehearsal.

But only this week is Mr. Flor conducting his first Mahler symphony here, the Ninth, in four performances. In fact, he didn't conduct Mahler anywhere for a good decade and a half. He didn't think he was ready.

Tuesday morning's rehearsal at the Meyerson was everything you would expect: intensely personal, occasionally quirky and absolutely electrifying. In a baggy gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Mr. Flor was plopped on a stool – when he wasn't leaping to his feet to whip the DSO musicians into frenzies.

He spent most of his time on the second movement, a parody of the waltz's country predecessor, with contrasting music at a faster tempo. Mahler marks it "Somewhat clumsy and very crude," but few conductors can resist prettifying it.

Not Mr. Flor, who kept lunging and bellowing to emphasize the legions of offbeat accents. It's a dance, yes, but a grotesquely stylized one.

Imagine a country gathering re-imagined by a German expressionist painter, all odd angles and raw colors. The faster music sounded downright desperate. Even early in the rehearsal process, the impact was hair-raising.

"His world was dying," Mr. Flor says of Mahler, who died in 1911, just a few years before Austria's Hapsburg Empire collapsed in the smoke of World War I. "If you really look to the Viennese folk music, it's a tragedy. You can just cry from the beginning." Superficially, the music "looks like fun, but there's this kind of sarcasm."

Indeed, the fearsome Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick sensed something tragic even in the waltzes of the Strauss family.

In the faster music of Mahler's second movement, Mr. Flor says, "You have to have this feeling that someone is sitting on your shoulder and riding you somewhere you don't want to go." That somewhere, he says, is death, which haunts much of the Ninth Symphony. Indeed, it's hard to hear the symphony's outer movements as anything but a farewell to life.

Why Flor's long Mahlerian hiatus?

Back in 1987, early in Mr. Flor's eight-year tenure as music director of the (East) Berlin Symphony Orchestra, he conducted a Mahler Fourth Symphony in Paris. An impresario he greatly respected came up to him afterward and said: "Congratulations, it was very nice. But I believe Mahler is not your composer yet."

"I was really sure he was right," Mr. Flor says, "or let's say he touched me. I had a lot of Mahlers planned, but I changed them."

Following a suggestion from the older German conductor Kurt Sanderling, one of his teachers, Mr. Flor found his way into Mahler by way of Shostakovich, whose mix of high and low art was much influenced by Mahler. And just a greater experience of life, its joys and tragedies, deepened the conductor's connection to one of the most intimately personal of composers.

Mr. Flor returned to Mahler just four years ago. Now his Mahlerian repertory includes the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth symphonies, and the Adagio from the unfinished Symphony No. 10.

"With a composer, I must have the feeling to be close to him," he says, "like a friend or a member of his circle."

Finally, after a long separation, Mahler and Mr. Flor look to be on close terms. And Mr. Flor's performances this weekend promise to be among the high points of the whole concert season.

Mr. Flor is booked for one more program this season, the Britten Sinfonia da Requiem and Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces, Feb. 28 through March 1, 2008. To the consternation of his many fans, in both the orchestra and DSO audiences, his contract as guest conductor isn't being renewed.

DSO president Fred Bronstein says, "I always envision Mr. Flor having a spot conducting this orchestra." But to date the conductor isn't booked for even one concert next season.

Which makes this week's Mahler Ninth, with more than a little farewell in its notes, all the more special.