The music industry’s woes in general, and those of the recording industry in particular, have drawn the attention of no less than the New Yorker, which published in last week’s issue a long essay by John Seabrook. That issue was dated July 7, the day on which, 143 years ago, Gustav Mahler was born. If anything, classical music is in even more dire straits than pop — mostly because no one is creating classical music that anyone wants to hear. Yet the Mahler boom of the ’80s and ’90s stuffed the catalogue with recordings of his symphonies; Beethoven and Brahms are scarcely better represented. And the outpouring of releases continues. At least 17 conductors have recorded complete sets of his symphonies (some more than once); Pierre Boulez (Deutsche Grammophon), Riccardo Chailly (Decca), Michael Gielen (Hänssler), Mariss Jansons (Simax), Robert Olson (Mahler Fest), Simon Rattle (EMI/Deutsche Grammophon), Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media), and Benjamin Zander (Telarc) are all in the process of joining them.

It’s not too hard to understand why Mahler’s music has become such a hot topic: his work addresses the same issues that pop aspires to, except that pop doesn’t usually draw on Schopenhauer or quote Nietzsche. Mahler’s symphonies provide conductors with a podium (sometimes it’s a soapbox) from which to expound his view of the world — and theirs. And there’s no world bigger than that of his Third. At some 95 minutes (it’s been stretched to 110), it’s the longest symphony ever written by a major composer, but that’s hardly excessive for Mahler’s concept, which is the evolution of human consciousness from its inert beginnings all the way to its awareness of Divine love. On the heels of the second recording of this symphony by Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon), Pierre Boulez and Michael Tilson Thomas have entered the lists (they’ll be joined shortly by Ben Zander), and it’s instructive to see how this generation of conductors compares with its peers of some 30 years ago.

Mahler himself provided the roadmap for the Third, which he finished in 1896, with a program note that he withdrew before its 1902 premiere:

Introduction: Pan wakes

I: Summer marches in (Bacchic procession)

II: What the flowers in the meadow tell me

III: What the animals in the forest tell me

IV: What humankind tells me

V: What the angels tell me

VI: What love tells me

Mahler completed the program before beginning work on the symphony, in the summer of 1895; he withdrew it because he knew that the music he’d composed went far beyond the words he’d written. Nonetheless, many conductors perform the Third as if it were an illustration of the program, an uplifting hymn to the human spirit that, transcending the Christian Apocalypse of the Second, rises into the company of Beethoven’s Ninth. The program in fact went through many drafts; what appears to be the first was called Das glückliche Leben ("The Happy Life") and Ein Sommernachtstraum ("A Summer Night’s Dream") and looked like this (the numbering reflects Mahler’s indecision over the movement order):

I: What the forest tells me

II: What the twilight tells me

III: What love tells me

III: What the twilight tells me

IV: What the flowers in the meadow tell me

V: What the cuckoo tells me

VI: What the child tells me

It’s a child’s story in which love is scarcely more important than twilight or cuckoos. But as Mahler reflects on Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and reads Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, the child grows up. Schopenhauer’s blind Will and Nietzsche’s gay science fight it out on the battlefield of the first movement (which Mahler wrote last), winter and summer; in the end, summer marches in.

But not just summer. The opening Dorian-mode theme for eight horns, which Mahler marked "Die Weckruf" ("The Waking Call"), recalls the big C-major theme of Brahms’s First Symphony, a theme whose first phrase Mahler had borrowed (unconsciously, one would think) for the discarded Blumine movement of his First Symphony. The version that reappears, now in F major (as if we’d wakened from modality to tonality), at bar 272 to kick off the first big march recalls the early-19th-century student song "Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus," which Brahms quotes in his Academic Festival Overture and which, as Paul Franklin notes in his excellent Cambridge University Press monograph on this symphony, was sung by defiant members of the German-nationalist Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens ("Reading Society of Viennese German Students") in December 1878 after the government’s decision to dissolve the organization, some of whose members were part of Mahler’s student circle. This first march is swallowed whole by the horns, struggling in the first agonies of consciousness (like the Alma-chrysalis in Ken Russell’s Mahler), or repressive like the Viennese authorities; it’s only after "Das Gesindel" ("The Rabble") join in and the "Südsturm" ("Southern Storm") sweeps through that winter is trampled underfoot. Richard Strauss recognized the movement’s political import: to him it suggested "the proletariat marching to the Prater on May Day." It’s no surprise that the year 1905 would find Mahler marching with workers on the Ringstraße.

Even more revolutionary than this movement’s politics, however, is the agonized journey of the spirit that follows. "What the Flowers Tell Me" is that they feel neither joy nor pain; in this minuet lashed by storm scherzo trios, they simply die, or rebloom. Only at the end is there a wistful glimmer of consciousness, as if they were Scarecrows wishing for a brain. "What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me" chirps and scurries thoughtlessly (apart from the clarinets’ allusion at bar 192 to the starving child in Mahler’s "Das irdische Leben") until the post coach makes its way through the woods and every creature stops to listen to the distant posthorn. Mahler surely had in mind Nicholas Lenau’s poem "Der Postillon," in which the postilion stops the coach near a churchyard and blows a salute to the old friend — also a postilion — who lies buried there. Nostalgic and forlorn, Mahler’s posthorn seems to embed the concept of mortality into the animals’ mind; when it has sounded for the last time, their thoughtlessness becomes nervousness — not for nothing did Mahler write of this movement in 1899 that "there is such a gruesome Panic humor in it, one is more likely to be overcome by horror than by laughter." A fff outburst marking the arrival of Pan sends everyone scurrying, but it’s not clear whether they’re running from us or, now, at us.

For the alto aria of "What Humankind Tells Me" Mahler draws on the "Mitternachtslied" of Zarathustra, but the orchestra opens with the same rocking figure that marked the symphony’s attempt to achieve consciousness in the first movement, as if the end of "What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me" had been a traumatic experience and the symphony were reconsidering its journey. The rising figure at "Tief ist ihr Weh" ("Deep is the world’s woe") is the same one the horns sounded at bar 57 of the first movement; now we know why they were so alarmed at the movement’s intention to go forward. It’s also the figure sounded by what Mahler in his manuscript called "Der Vogel der Nacht" ("The bird of night"), four times by the oboe and once by the cor anglais, perhaps in reference to the "bird of night" in Friedrich Hölderlin’s "Die Kurze" ("Brevity"), which flies so close, one has to shield one’s eyes — as if it were one of the previous movement’s "panicked" forest creatures. In the score, Mahler writes "Hinaufziehen" ("Pull up"?) and "Wie ein Naturlaut" ("Like a sound of nature"). On his 1997 EMI recording with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle had his oboe and cor anglais play an upward glissando; David Gutman in the Gramophone described the result as like being "menaced by the intrusive, upward slurred portamentos of Hitchcockian seagulls," and ever since, debate has raged over whether Mahler wanted these passages to suggest an actual bird. That they should menace is not in doubt; after the alto has concluded that "alle Lust will Ewigkeit" ("all joy wants to be eternal"), the oboe is heard one last time, as if to warn us that sorrow may be deeper than joy.

Having concluded the opposite, however, humankind goes to church, where the angel choirs of women and boys, directed to be "keck in Ausdruck" ("cheeky in expression") in their performance of the Knaben Wunderhorn song "Es sungen drei Engel," remind us all that Jesus has redeemed us from sin. The naive humor that runs through Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is in evidence here; it’s not clear whether public celebration can lift the shadow of private doubt.

Or whether love by itself can find God. "What Love Tells Me" tells of two sensibilities: one, initially in D, an angel that has no concept of time or development; and one, initially in F-sharp minor, a mortal whose yearning for the reassurance of its fellow leads to crises in the music (including the "Weh" figure from the first and fourth movements). On their second appearance, they draw on each other but without success; for their third, the angel tries to go it alone, but the mortal won’t be silenced. Finally, with the flute signaling the release of the mortal’s soul, the angel accepts the mortal’s pain and suffering as part of itself, thus creating a new (to humanity) kind of consciousness.

On his manuscript, Mahler wrote the following epigraph for this movement: "Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein! Kein Wesen laß verloren sein." ("Father, look upon my wounds! Let no creature of Thine be lost."). The angel theme derives from the alto’s "Komm und erbarme dich über mich" ("Come and have mercy on me," recalling Amfortas’s words to the Grail Knights in Parsifal) in the fifth movement, but the melody has also been likened to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Opus 135 string quartet, and to the slow movement of Hans Rott’s Symphony in E. Rott was a student friend of Mahler who died mad in 1884, just short of his 26th birthday. The descending trumpet figure that initiates the movement’s final crisis at bar 219 also draws from Rott. Is Mahler asking God why He deserted this creature of His?

Having begun in D minor, the Third Symphony ends in what should be a transcendent D major, though the static, tub-thumping nature of the final pages underlines the difficulty of depicting the eternal in music. (Mahler made another attempt with the Poco Adagio of his Fourth Symphony.) It’s the first movement that explodes with "Lust." Incorporating every imaginable creature in its military-band racket, it rolls past the cellos’ allusion to the "je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein" ("I would rather be in Heaven") of the Second Symphony at bar 730 and, annunciated by the finale’s descending crisis figure, races to its riotous conclusion, not transcending the initial D minor but simply finishing in its relative major, F. At the end of the movement, Mahler wrote, "Dem der da kommen wird! Denen die da sein werden!" ("To the one who will get there! To those who will be there!"). Some will hear greater conviction in this opening hymn to Nietzschean becoming than in the closing one to Divine love.

FEW SYMPHONIES give a conductor this kind of opportunity to weigh in on the Meaning of Life — and few so mercilessly expose a conductor’s lack of matter. In the past few years, there’ve been new recordings of the Third from Vladimir Ashkenazy (Decca), Michael Gielen, Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen (Sony), Jesús López-Cobos (Telarc), Glen Cortese (Titanic), Andrew Litton (Delos), Kent Nagano (Teldec), Claudio Abbado, Robert Olson, and Semyon Bychkov (Avie) plus first-time releases of older versions from Rafael Kubelik (Audite) and John Barbirolli (BBC Legends). Now, we have Boulez and Tilson Thomas, both of whom have had prior versions on record, Boulez in 1974 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Artists), Tilson Thomas in 1987 with the London Symphony Orchestra (Columbia). You can make the case that today’s conductors play Mahler more accurately — in part because the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft has made more-accurate scores available. Whether they interpret him more interestingly is another matter.

Pierre Boulez is finishing up his Mahler cycle (split between the Chicago Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic) for Deutsche Grammophon, with just the Second and the Eighth left. Michael Tilson Thomas is on the third leg of his cycle, having started off with the Sixth and the First, and it’s to his credit and that of the San Francisco Symphony that they’ve packaged these house releases so attractively and gotten regular distribution from HMV, Tower, and Virgin. Boulez’s movement timings are almost identical to those of the live Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic performance that Deutsche Grammophon released last year (and to those of his own 1974 performance), compact but not hurried. Tilson Thomas is considerably more expansive, taking 106:44 to Boulez’s 95:23 (his first movement is now six minutes slower than it was in 1987). Boulez offers just the symphony; Tilson Thomas adds a hefty bonus in the form of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children"). Boulez’s mezzo, Anne Sofie von Otter, has a lyric voice that suits his no-nonsense conception; Michelle DeYoung, who sings for Tilson Thomas (she’s also on the López-Cobos performance), is more operatic. Tilson Thomas positions his first and second violins antiphonally, as was Mahler’s practice; Boulez does not. Tilson Thomas’s release is a stereo hybrid SACD; Boulez’s is an ordinary CD. Both offer intelligent liner notes, the great Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange for Boulez, former Boston Symphony Orchestra program-note writer Michael Steinberg for Tilson Thomas (who was himself an assistant BSO conductor back in the ’70s) — though in this department everyone is put to shame by Michael Gielen, who, writing his own notes, ranges from Jean Paul (Mahler’s favorite novelist) to Georg Trakl to Robert Musil.

Boulez’s Third sounds very much like the one I heard him give in Carnegie Hall in March 2001, just a month after this recording was made. At 33:34, his first movement is unusually spacious for him; the various sections have their own tempos, and the Vienna Philharmonic provides characterization and detail, the brass in particular balanced between brazen and burnished. The first march could be a shade jauntier, the horns that sing out the "Wir hatten gebauet" theme at bar 272 a little less polite, the winds at bar 306 a little more soused. But the climaxes, pointed rather than massed, are pellucid, and overall the individual instruments create an aural panorama worthy of Brueghel or Bosch. Boulez falters only at the very end, accelerating (as most of his peers do) where Mahler has written "Sehr drängend" ("Press forward"), so that the trumpets, which should gallop, instead stampede.

The rest is less exalted — it’s as if the musical complexities of the first movement had got his attention but not the philosophical questions raised by the remaining five. The minuet is a little short on Viennese lilt, and the trios, which should be faster, are taken at almost the same tempo, Boulez focusing, as is his wont, on the music’s architecture rather than on its emotional contour. The opening of the scherzo, which should scurry, only ambles, and both the B and the E-flat clarinets are inappropriately mellow. Hans Peter Schuh’s posthorn solo is too distant and only sporadically nostalgic, and though Pan’s appearance makes a big impact, there’s no menace, no "Panic humor," in the animals’ reaction. Anne Sofie von Otter’s voice seems very light for the "Mitternachtslied": her "Gib acht" ("Pay heed") sounds like Sarah Jessica Parker inviting a guy up for a nightcap. The oboe and cor anglais produce elegantly subtle glissandos for the "Vogel der Nacht," however, and the brass sell "alle Lust will Ewigkeit." The churchy acoustic for "Es sungen drei Engel" means that the choirs don’t sound very "keck," and Otter leans unpleasantly on her "über mich," but the orchestra in its surge at 2:19 does convey religious doubt. The Adagio finale, at a moderate tempo, is beautifully played, but again Boulez’s handling of the mortal second theme stresses architecture rather than anguish, and he ignores Mahler’s direction by pressing to the finish.

In theory, Tilson Thomas’s slower tempos should afford him the opportunity to make big statements, but his opening "Weckruf" sounds merely sluggish, and that’s the watchword for most of this performance. On CD, at least (I didn’t hear the SACD version), the first movement suffers from soft-edged horns, backward trumpets, and an unassertive snare drum; the phrasing too is soft-edged, with big gestures rather than big ideas. Points, however, for not dashing to the finish. The minuet has less clarity than Boulez’s but more tenderness at the end. The scherzo starts purposefully and Glenn Fischthal’s posthorn is more romantic than Schuh’s, but it’s just as distant, and the conclusion, like Boulez’s, is unthreatening. Michelle DeYoung’s heavier voice seems more appropriate for this material than Otter’s, and though Tilson Thomas forgoes the glissandos in "O Mensch," he and DeYoung are emphatic and expressive in the second half of the song; the big surge of panic in "Es sungen drei Engel," however, doesn’t have the ominous space around it that Boulez creates. And the Adagio, at the same very slow tempo Tilson Thomas adopted in 1987, is just as unformed as it was back then, though there are beautifully phrased moments. The timpani on the last page are, like almost every conductor’s, too loud (they’re marked f against the trumpets’ ff), but at least he takes this final section in tempo.

This reading is less mannered than the Tilson Thomas Sixth that appeared last year, and the accompanying Kindertotenlieder are beautiful if a shade objective ("In diesem Wetter" could use more urgency). But it’s hard to hear Tilson Thomas doing anything here that Leonard Bernstein, for one, hasn’t done better. Boulez’s Third has its superb playing and the conductor’s intelligence to recommend it; so does the live 1999 Third that Claudio Abbado did with Berlin Philharmonic in London’s Royal Festival Hall, but though Abbado is more scrupulous in his observance of Mahler’s markings, Deutsche Grammophon’s recording lets him down.

WHAT’S MISSING from the current crop of Mahler Thirds — and from most new classical releases — is the very thing that justifies new performances of old music: a distinct point of view. What distinguishes Abbado’s new Third from Boulez’s is largely the distinctive sound of the Berlin as opposed to the Vienna Philharmonic. Right now these orchestras are likely the world’s two best, and you could make the same claim for their conductors. All the same, you won’t hear much that’s new from these performances.

Back when music was more than notes, conductors didn’t just wrestle with the score, they wrestled with the ideas behind it. That’s why many older recordings make the present ones seem impoverished and impersonal. At the end of his first movement, Jascha Horenstein (Unicorn) finds a novel way to sound urgent without urging the London Symphony into a noisy scramble: instead of pressing forward, he has the orchestra strut in the khosidl rhythm (think Fiddler on the Roof’s "If I Were a Rich Man") that Mahler used in the klezmer irruptions of his First Symphony’s funeral march, with the result that everyone arrives poised and suave rather than breathless and sweaty. Klaus Tennstedt in his London Philharmonic recording (EMI) solves the scherzo’s posthorn problem — the same distant sound that’s three-dimensional and full in the concert hall becomes one-dimensional and flat on CD — by creating a temporal rather than a spatial warp: his up-close soloist plays in a reverberant acoustic and in a hyper-romantic style that looks back a century to Jean Paul.

Critics have called the Thirds of Horenstein and Tennstedt — as well as those of Rafael Kubelik (Deutsche Grammophon or Audite), John Barbirolli (BBC Legends), Leonard Bernstein (Sony or Deutsche Grammophon), and James Levine (RCA Japan) — wayward, but never generic. Each of these conductors, in his own way, stood up and told us what this symphony meant to him. It’s heartening to see that, even in a down economy, Mahler is still being recorded (this is Deutsche Grammophon’s sixth Third, and it has eight Ninths in the catalogue). And it would be naive to suggest that a Mahler Third that had something truly new to say would sell appreciably more copies. But a performance that spoke for Mahler now might remind us in 2030 why Mahler continues to speak to us.