From the very first bars, as the violins blur and slide into their opening tones, it is pure eroticism. Then comes the incisiveness of the winds after that startlingly tender sonority, the turmoil after just a few measures, rising from the halting, throbbing third–fourth motif up to blazing tuttis. Daring rubato, shrill piccolo flutes, the ominous writing on the wall from timpani and brass: hell bursts open—and heaven with it. Mahler’s Ninth, the catastrophes and unfathomable beauties of his final symphony from 1909, sound as if heard for the first time in the Mahler Academy Orchestra’s Originalklang Project under the direction of the former Abbado-assistant Philipp von Steinaecker. Transparent, heart-rending, shatteringly modern: this is how one would want to hear all Mahler symphonies from now on.