One must know that in Mahler’s time tempo was almost never stable, but in constant flux—like life itself. “You cannot approach this music with geometry,” Steinaecker is convinced. Yet this continual fluctuation in tempo sharpens the music’s expressive power, especially where it approaches death, at the end of the third movement and even more so in the fourth. Steinaecker endures slowness without resorting to the clichés that portray historical performance practice as inherently favoring faster tempi. But he also accelerates again and again in unexpected ways, as if the music were racing toward its final end.