These live performances taken from Lorin Maazel's recent cycle with the Philharmonia in London took me by surprise. Renowned for an element of showmanship and within a general context of expressive flexibility, Maazel is generous with rubato. Several of the main climaxes arrive with a good old-fashioned deployment of the brakes for maximum wallop factor. But the tenor of his style remains judiciously diverse. With the timing and pace of a natural opera conductor, he also shows how to spread and extend a climax through multiple peaks, magnificently so with the lead back into the return of the eight-horn opening theme of the Third Symphony's first movement. Never sacrificing spontaneity to predictability, shape, purpose and direction are maintained throughout individual movements and each symphony as a whole. Excitement is full-on and spectacular, yet movements of intimacy can be utterly captivating; overall tension never sags. Mahler's inner narratives are drawn with conviction, flair and vivid imagery wholly at one with the spirit of the music.

Some listeners may construe this degree of subjectivity and panache as playing to the gallery, but these qualities surely remain intrinsic to Mahler's all-encompassing vision, especially in these early 'Wunderhorn' symphonies. Far better to give them their head when required, rather than short-change or, even worse, pay awkwardly studied ear-service to them. Maazel's prodigious technique is renowned, but he delves deeply here, clearly responding to these works from the inside with a huge fund of attentive and personal experience.

The Philharmonia players follow him on every step of the journey with virtuosity and sensitivity, achieving a freshness and sense of wonder as though playing these works for the first time. The vocal contributions from choruses and soloists all take wing, with Sarah Connolly's rapt Nietzschean communion in the Third Symphony a memorable highlight.

The sound captured in the Royal Festival Hall is wide-ranging, with outstanding solidity in the bass that speaks of balance from the podium and a listening orchestra rather than rigging after the event in the editorial process. The vaulting cellos/bass ostinato at the peroration of the finale of the First Symphony has rarely been articulated with such energy and precsnce to underpin the fanfares blazing above. Clarity is maintained with space and perspective without undue resonance or saturation to blur the edges.

More than many recent Mahler performances, Maazel's resound with a comprehensive grasp and insight into the composer's statement that his Third Symphony will be 'a work in which the whole world is reflected'. This brings them very much into the Bernstein/Tennstedt orbit, yet they remain passionately individual. The live constituent adds enormously to their reach and memorability, but not as a one-off experience to be admired then consigned to the shelf. Their power and fascination offer irresistible bait to discover anew what makes this composer such a maddeningly compelling phenomenon.