Gustav Mahler’s birthday is this Sunday, July 7, and if he could hear these three new Deutsche Grammophon recordings of live performances by the Berlin Philharmonic (now probably the world’s finest symphony orchestra) led by Claudio Abbado (certainly one of the world’s half-dozen finest conductors), he’d have ample reason to celebrate. These are among the best interpretations you can buy of Mahler’s Third, Seventh, and Ninth Symphonies, and that’s no mean feat given the mind-boggling number of alternatives. Yet what I think might please Gustav the most is the way Abbado’s self-effacing style puts the spotlight on the composer rather than the conductor. His performances prompt the most basic questions about what it means to interpret music.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s choice to succeed Herbert von Karajan as its artistic director in 1990, Claudio Abbado has gradually broadened the sonic palette of an outfit that in its 35 years with Karajan had achieved a Zen-like polish and precision. The trumpets have taken on a Last Judgment edge, the French horns a lost-childhood innocence. The formerly cultivated winds embrace a cacophony of forest sounds, a cicada here, a whippoorwill there; the strings can go in a second from sachertorte to spooky, the percussion from sardonic to spectral. By the time these three live performances were given, two in 1999 and the other one last year, the Berliners boasted a kaleidoscope of sound most other orchestras could only dream about.

Abbado didn’t have such a kaleidoscope in his first attempt at recording Mahler’s symphonies, with the Chicago Symphony (Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7) and the Vienna Philharmonic (Nos. 3, 4, and 9, all on Deutsche Grammophon): Chicago was brilliant but chilly (Georg Solti’s influence), Vienna warm but cultured. Neither had he located his own still point in the dialectic that is classical conducting as, like every musician, he asked himself whether there’s more to the musical universe than a score can map. Writing about the Karajan and Abbado recordings of the Mahler Sixth for the Gramophone back in 1980, Richard Osborne divided them into " sense " (Abbado) and " sensibility " (Karajan). You could call it the intersection of the horizontal (the music’s movement through time) and the vertical (its dialogue with God, or the transcendent, or just memory). Or the intersection of light as particle and light as wave.

The Abbado of the ’70s and ’80s was a connect-the-particles conductor whose Mahler performances attempted to unify the plethora of directions in the composer’s overmarked scores. He didn’t always succeed: those recordings, to my ears, sound literal and inorganic, and when he essays a very slow tempo (the Adagio of No. 3, the Poco Adagio of No. 4, the Adagietto of No. 5), the result is self-conscious. There was praise from those conservative (that is, those who like a conductor to stick to the score) Mahlerites who found Solti too brutal and Bernard Haitink too bland; liberal listeners, however, continued to prefer the more personal and emotional approach exemplified by Jascha Horenstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Klaus Tennstedt.

Over the past decade, however, it’s not just the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic that’s bloomed like the city’s linden trees: Abbado himself has opened up. These days he breathes life into his performances (not just of Mahler, as those who’ve heard his BPO Beethoven and Bruckner at Symphony Hall in recent years can attest). In the process he’s also shown how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to performing classical music. Music is in fact not confined to what is written in a score (this will hardly come as a surprise to any jazz musician, or for that matter anyone who plays Bach): it " swings " in the same unnotatable way that spoken Italian does (the Italian word for this is " slancio " ). The catch is that as soon as a performer — whether it’s a conductor or a chamber group or a vocal or instrumental soloist — tries to fill in what the score of necessity leaves out, he or she goes off in his or her direction and not the composer’s.

Abbado, as a Northern Italian conductor in the Toscanini tradition, has as his natural domain the score, head as opposed to heart, music as horizontal (enjoyment of life) rather than vertical (inquisition of the Deity), and light as particle rather than wave. But the glory of these three readings is the way they verge on the intersection of these opposites. No conductor who takes the literal approach to Mahler has pushed exposition this close to expression. You might expect that honor would go to Pierre Boulez in his ongoing Mahler cycle (also for Deutsche Grammophon). But Pierre doesn’t always stop at the emotional excrescences that over the past century have, like barnacles, attached themselves to the symphonies — sometimes he goes on to strip out Mahler’s markings as to dynamics, tempo, expression, and phrasing. It’s a hypermodern view (prompted no little by Theodor Adorno) that proposes to save Mahler from his own bourgeois prejudices by holding that only the notes count. Michael Gielen is another superb Mahler interpreter in the straightforward tradition, but he hasn’t refined his approach to the degree that Abbado has (i.e., mannerisms — some of them endearing — still creep in). And though his SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Symphony Orchestra plays like a household-name outfit, it’s not quite the Berlin Philharmonic.

The new Berlin sound is Abbado’s ace in the hole: his instrumentalists exude so much personality that he can afford to be recessive. He’s also contemporary conducting’s best balancing act. Mahler, his reputation for big orchestras and big sound notwithstanding, wrote what amount to chamber symphonies, where every instrumental line contributes to a complex orchestral conversation. Bad Mahler conductors either produce a massed sound or allow the " melody " to drown out the other speakers. Abbado is unrivaled in his ability to make every instrument audible (just imagine if he had been in charge of sound for Robert Altman’s films). The plangent oboes in the Third’s second-movement minuet; the E-flat clarinets at the outset of the third movement; the trumpet line beginning at bar 21 of the morning-bell fifth movement, the oboes, now penitent, at bar 42, and the remission-bearing trombones at bar 101; the anguish of the French horns at bar 55 of the Adagio finale, the resignation of the cellos at bar 123 — you can find an example on almost every page, and the same holds for the Seventh (don’t miss the way the trombone fanfare at bars 45-46 of the Rondo-Finale underlines the Meistersinger allusion) and the Ninth.

Abbado’s command of Mahler’s sound picture is summed up by what he does with the controversial " hinaufziehen " passages — three for oboe, one for cor anglais — in the Third Symphony’s Nietzsche movement, where Mahler wrote in the manuscript " Bird of the Night " (meaning the kind of sound Zarathustra tells us you can hear only at night). Simon Rattle, in his EMI recording with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, interprets Mahler’s marking as an upward glissando; Gramophone reviewer David Gutman described the result as like being " menaced by the intrusive, upward slurred portamentos of Hitchcockian seagulls. " It would be fair to say that Rattle calls attention to the effect — and why not, since he’s the first conductor to conjure this bird call. Gielen’s Third is a tad subtler but likewise pauses to admire the effect. Abbado is subtler still and pauses not at all; his oboe and cor anglais annunciate Mahler’s bird without abandoning their instrumental identity.

The second big difference in Abbado’s " new " Mahler is tempo. These recordings are tighter than their predecessors, most notably in the Adagio of the Third, where the 26:38 of Abbado’s Vienna performance has been trimmed to 22 minutes flat, this conductor’s acknowledgment that he’s not temperamentally suited to the 28:01 of Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic/DG Third or the 28 minutes plus of James Levine’s February 2001 performance with the BSO. (Only the Adagio of the Ninth is appreciably slower than before, but it’s still well within his expressive range.) The third big difference is Abbado’s phrasing, nuance on nuance. When Mahler instructs the posthorn to take its time at bar 275 of the Third Symphony’s Scherzo, Abbado makes sure that it does. Check the infinitesimal hesitation at bar 12 and again at 16 of the Adagio Finale, and then the sigh in the strings at 116 and 145 and 205. There’s the tender string phrasing at bar 134 of the Seventh’s first movement and the ritardendo at 371-72, the melancolisch first violins at bar 59 of Nachtmusik II and the way the last 20 bars relax, and the pregnant pause (is the Merry Widow expecting?) at bars 51-52 of the Rondo-Finale and then the Old World " grazioso " at bar 220. And in the Ninth Symphony, the little sigh with which the second movement ends, and the way he waits on the turning figures that begin at bar 84 of the Adagio finale, just before the bassoon countertheme makes its third and last appearance, and the last page, 27 impossibly slow (they last a full five minutes), impossibly quiet measures that leave the Philharmonie audience stunned, just as the Abbado/BPO Ninth did listeners in Symphony Hall back in 1993. He’s the orchestral counterpart of his good friend pianist (and fellow Milanese) Maurizio Pollini: music as mathematics with heart.

Where these releases fall short of the ineffable is in their tepid tempo relationships, in a recorded sound that’s far from ideal, and, most crucially for this listener, in their disinclination to push the envelope of the score. Although Abbado is a master of dynamic levels — those moments at which the music becomes quiet are heart-rendingly hushed — he seems reluctant to observe Mahler’s frequently marked tempo modifications. At bar 217 of the Third’s second-movement minuet, Mahler writes " Ganz plötzlich gemächlich " ( " All of a sudden comfortable " ); Abbado makes a very modest adjustment. Ditto for the " Nicht mehr so breit " ( " No longer so broad " ) at bar 41 of the Third’s finale, the " Subito Allegro I " ( " Resume the beginning Allegro " ) at bar 266 of the Seventh’s first movement, the " Plötzlich sehr mässig und zurückhaltend " ( " Suddenly very measured and holding back " ) at bar 130 of the Ninth’s opening Andante, and so on. It is of course, Abbado’s nature to underplay, and in at least one instance (bar 240 of the Seventh’s first movement) he maintains a steady pace where many of his peers indulge in an unmarked accelerando, but the result is very muted Mahler.

Deutsche Grammophon’s sound also raises questions. In his Gramophone review of the Third, which was recorded at the Royal Festival Hall in London, David Gutman writes that " the decision has been made to remake the sound, adding bags of resonance and an exaggerated stereo spread — not quite consonant in focus but probably better than the drier effect in the hall. Even with a high volume setting, orchestral climaxes remain reluctant to expand (frustratingly so at the end of the first movement) while anything below piano lacks focus (annoyingly so at the start of the fourth). " Tony Duggan in Classical Music Web review compares the " very bright and clear acoustic " that he recalls from the original BBC broadcast with the CD’s sound — " spatially very wide with . . . much more air around the sound than we are used to in this hall " — and concludes that " the DG engineers appear to have mastered the sound somewhat. "

That was my experience with all three symphonies: the volume needs to be cranked up, the climaxes don’t always open out, soft passages don’t always register, and the sound has more air than body. (But is DG responsible? To judge from a CD made from the original broadcast of the Third, the BBC sound is a little brighter and more focused but not that different from what DG has given us.) The first movement of the Third short-shrifts Dionysus (hard to tell whether this is Abbado’s fault), and the posthorns of other recent recordings (Leonard Bernstein, Leif Segerstam, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Andrew Litton, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle) have far more presence, as do Jascha Horenstein’s legendary flügelhorn and even Klaus Tennstedt’s " mere " trumpet (rather than being far away it’s hopelessly romantic à la Jean Paul). Abbado’s trumpets too are often backward, a serious detriment in these symphonies. And I’m sorry that he doesn’t separate the first and second violins, as Otto Klemperer, Jascha Horenstein, Rafael Kubelik, Simon Rattle, and Benjamin Zander do in their Mahler recordings; when all the violins are grouped on the conductor’s left, the dialogues that Mahler wrote for them (for example at bar 147 of the Ninth’s Andante, where they pass the melody back and forth) don’t register.

Most of all, I wish Abbado had still more give — that is, " swing " — to his phrasing. In the opening bars of the Seventh’s first Nachtmusik, he takes the dotted French-horn rhythms (dotted rhythms are characteristic in Mahler’s marches, propelling us forward where we might not wish to go) strictly as written when by leaning against the beat he could have sparked tension between going forward and holding back. And at the beginning of the recapitulation in the Andante of the Ninth, he doesn’t give the return of the initial theme the world-weariness you’d expect for material that’s been through such a harrowing development section. Which brings us back to the question of whether there’s music here we can’t " see " in the score, and if so where to look for it. The kind of " swing " that seems natural to me has also seemed natural to many Mahler conductors, but it’s never really been natural to Abbado — and we don’t know for sure that it would have been natural to Mahler.

At least there’s no shortage of serious Mahler interpreters trying to answer these questions. Simon Rattle and Pierre Boulez are well into their Mahler cycles for EMI and Deutsche Grammophon respectively (the powerful Third that Boulez did with the Vienna Philharmonic last year is expected out once Abbado’s Third has had time to settle). Sixths have recently appeared from Michael Gielen (on Hänssler) and Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony (on the Symphony’s own label), and another one is due next month from Benjamin Zander and the Philharmonia (on Telarc), all part of projected cycles. Live ’70s performances by the underrated Rafael Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony are coming out on Audite; EMI is in the process of reissuing Klaus Tennstedt’s impassioned set at reduced prices. Japanese imports of James Levine’s incomplete (no Second or Eighth) RCA series are even turning up.

All that means there’s no shortage of competition. The wonderful Thirds from Horenstein and Levine are disgracefully hard to come by, but Gielen (also underrated) and Bernstein (Sony or DG) are readily available, and Tennstedt is available as part of a mid-price double-disc set with his Fourth (both Tennstedt and Rattle, however, get a mandatory deduction for sprinting through the final page). Bernstein has always been a master of the Seventh (again Sony or DG), but the past few years have brought must-have one-disc versions from Boulez, Gielen, Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Yoel Levi plus a reissue of Hermann Scherchen’s 1954 Vienna State Opera performance. Bernstein’s Berlin Philharmonic Ninth is another must, even though the Berlin trombones are inexplicably silent for their big moment at bar 118 of the Adagio (they’re there for Abbado); so is one of the five Horenstein recordings. Deutsche Grammophon, by getting Abbado’s Seventh and the Ninth onto one compact disc each (the Third, at 90 minutes minimum, always requires two) and offering all three symphonies at reduced prices ($22 for the Third, $15 each for the Seventh and Ninth at HMV as of this past Monday), has made these new releases that much more attractive.

And perhaps there’ll be more from Abbado. He has survived (we all hope) a bout with stomach cancer; even before that, he had decided not to renew his contract with the Berlin Philharmonic. But he’s just 68 this year, and if he doesn’t quite have the last word on these symphonies, he’s at least become an essential part of the conversation. As for Mahler, his time has indeed come, and it’s not going away. Happy birthday, Gustl.