Music review: BBC SSO & Donald Runnicles, City Halls, Glasgow, City Halls, Glasgow *****

What should we make of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, with its quizzical confrontations between life and death? Was the composer, in his last completed symphony, simply resigned to the inevitable? (He died before its premiere in 1911.) Or was he celebrating the sheer joy of existence?

In a supremely moving, thoroughly argued and emotionally exhaustive performance with the BBC SSO, conductor emeritus Sir Donald Runnicles argued convincingly that the conundrum is, itself, the answer. There was no over-egging the dogged intensity of the outer movements or underplaying the delinquent harmonic contortions of the inner two; this was a performance of singular intention that simultaneously embraced the symphony’s pulverising expressive diversity.

Donald Runnicles on stage with the BBC SSO PIC: John Wood

What Runnicles does so well is to assert the strength of his own personality without overprescribing on the minutiae. That way the music evolves with natural, unhampered inevitability. The opening movement was a classic example, a madcap complexity of Mahlerian driftwood – brittle motifs thrown together with such determined impatience they magically make sense – that heaved between heartrending melancholy and tortuous abandon. The movement’s final descent into pure chamber music was unforgettably intimate.

If the emphasis there was on the profound, the central movements were an earthy diversion. Runnicles appeared to view both as a progression towards the absurd, the zingy grotesqueness of the Ländler, its folkish lustre and awkward gait, held in slight containment, before the untrammelled exuberance and frenzied, cartoon-like eccentricities of the ensuing Rondo-Burleske.

Then the calmer intensity of the finale, the ravishing warmth of its opening hymn, the aching spareness and succession of tidal surges that eventually dissipated into a timeless, fading acceptance, and a prolonged silence that had this capacity audience utterly transfixed.

You won’t hear the SSO any better than this. Runnicles repeats the programme in Aberdeen tonight and Edinburgh on Sunday.