*** Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with contralto Birgit Remmert and baritone Simon Keenlyside

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 3 and songs from DES KNABEN WUNDERHORN

(EMI)

At the tender age of 44, Simon Rattle is a classy Mahler conductor -- arguably the world's classiest -- whose recordings suggest a huge talent that, like a huge wine, hasn't reached its peak. Last year's recording of the big Ninth has room to grow; his recording of the Fourth, on the other hand, has been bettered only by the performances he led with the BSO last weekend.

The Third is another big work, both in length (96 minutes here) and in concept (six movements ranging from "What the Rocks Tell Me" to "What Love Tells Me," with a Nietzsche stop along the way). Rattle's 30-minute-plus opening movement spares us the braying trombones of so many of its peers, but it doesn't quite solve the problem that Mahler's endless slow-moving "generation" poses, and the opposing march theme could be rowdier, especially the B-flat clarinets, which have clearly ducked into a local ("Eins! Zwei! G'suffa!") as the proletariat roll down the Prater. At the end, too, he interprets Gustav's "drängend" as a direction to sprint to the finish.

The chamber-like Minuet is delectable; the Scherzo has wind-animals that are positively Sendakian and a magically distant posthorn, but I wish he'd let it lose itself, stop time. Contralto Birgit Remmert arbitrates nicely between arty and folky in the "Midnight" fourth movement, and Rattle's controversial oboe glissandos, which flummoxed Gramophone reviewer David S. Gutman, beguile on further acquaintance. I found the children's-choir bell movement over-reverberant and without the bright, direct naïveté Jascha Horenstein brought to it, and the celestial final movement is a shade restless, with, again, an apotheosis that's more dashing than I believe Gustav's "a tempo" warrants.

Not Mahler for the ages, then, or a reading to displace the benchmarks of Horenstein and Leonard Bernstein -- but this won't be Rattle's last Third, and besides, his Mahler recordings have a way of growing, of rewarding the persistent listener and discomfiting the picky reviewer. The fill-up for this two-disc set, eight Wunderhorn songs from Rattle and baritone Simon Keenlyside, is kaleidoscopic in color and superbly characterized, especially in the Brechtian mince-and-menace of "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt."

-- Jeffrey Gantz