Following his account of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2018, British conductor Daniel Harding has now released Mahler’s Fifth with the orchestra in what is billed to be a complete cycle on Harmonia Mundi. It’s a refreshing, detailed account of a symphony that – composed in the early years of the 20th century – has accumulated a lot of history.

 

Harding gives a broad, drawn out reading of the first movement’s funeral march, heralded as it is with its distinctive trumpet solo harking back to Mahler’s Fourth. The lyrical moments linger, with a hushed sense of longing, more plaintive than in recent accounts by Vänskä in Minnesota and Roth in...