The Sixth Symphony remains the teeming explosive but entirely self-sufficient musical argument it always was but No

The Sixth Symphony remains the teeming, explosive but entirely self-sufficient musical argument it always was; but No 7 feels more than ever like the morning after the Walpurgisnacht. It doesn't merely echo the Sixth, it emerges from its shadow. But Tennstedt had more to say about this music than he had time to say it in.EDWARD SECKERSONAn intriguing coupling. It would make a fascinating concert - for those with the necessary stamina. Rattle has the best solution: don't try to make sense of it (what is it but a collage, a sequence of transitions), just make for the silver lining and that banquet of a coda.If this is your first time, so to speak, then Rattle (EMI) is still your best bet for the Seventh Similarly Bernstein (DG) in the Sixth. But I like its elemental, unhoned quality, I like the fact that Tennstedt maximises the work's eccentricities - though even he cannot salvage the outlandish Finale: a kind of Viennese "Come Dancing" for the uncoordinated. The London Philharmonic cease playing but rather take possession of the notes.

I'm still hearing that ignominious string bass pizzicato, like a final lifeline snapping on entry to the broken coda.The Seventh, from two years later (you see, he did overcome, albeit temporarily), is rougher and readier. The Scherzo's double-trio verges on a parody of the parody (what was it Cardus said: "a landler for polar bears"?), while everything about the voluminous Finale is writ large, larger, largest. The sheer effort of will conveyed at the threshold of the final climax - an absolutely tremendous crescendo of wishful thinking - is of an intensity that few in my experience have equalled Klaus Tennstedt fighting for his life. The rubatos (often breathtakingly extravagant) are inbred, any given phrase, paragraph, movement, will take as long as it takes Like Bernstein, he'll always go the extra distance. You could no more emulate Tennstedt in a passage like this than you could Leonard Bernstein. Tennstedt conveys an extraordinary sense of its cold comfort, fragments of the aspiring "Alma" theme now drifting aimlessly, longing to be whole again.

Take that visionary passage from the development of the first movement, an imagined existence far from the madding crowds, high above the hurly-burly, closer to heaven but remote - as Schoenberg once observed - from the warmth of humanity. Something happened at the Royal Festival Hall in November 1991. Which doesn't necessarily make for a greater musical experience, just a more personal one And, in Mahler, that's often the same thing. But given his uncanny temperamental affinity with this composer, and with the Sixth Symphony in particular, and given that, only having looked into the abyss, can you really know how it feels, it's probably reasonable to suggest that Klaus Tennstedt never came closer to living, really living, the symphony than he did here. Life imitating art imitating life? It makes for good copy, of course: Klaus Tennstedt, engaged in his own life-or-death struggle with a debilitating illness, fights the good fight for Mahler. Right now there are Hyperion groupies, Hyperion junkies the world over. In Richmond, Virginia, one Dave Fox has logged the entire Hyperion catalogue on to the Internet: that's colour reproductions of the sleeves, content details, timings, notes, artist profiles, discographies - everything Another satisfied customer? Idolatry, more like They're awfully grateful to Dave over at New Eltham..

If I decide to record the Arriaga Symphony, Joanna can be on the phone to the ECO and I can be calling Sir Charles Mackerras in the time..." - in the time it would take someone at Sony to draft a memo?Today's serious record-buyers are less interested in duplicating "core repertoire" (is that in itself a comment on the impersonal nature of so many recordings?) than embarking upon voyages of discovery We live in the age of the series. Hyperion currently has several on the go: the Romantic Piano Concertos, Robert King's Purcell, Graham Johnson's Schubert Songs, Leslie Howard's Liszt (currently at volume 34). As a marketing concept, it's working - though more by accident than design. Each new release generates interest in earlier releases, each conspires to keep the whole series alive But at the root of it all is trust. I don't have to go through an international planning committee to get a project the go-ahead. When an idea comes my way, I can make up my mind that minute. "My biggest advantage," says Perry, "is speed and flexibility.