It is one thing to be nostalgic for a golden age of music making, quite another to be able to re-create it. But here, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales achieved a performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony that recaptured the halcyon days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Tadaaki Otaka was principal conductor. Now their conductor laureate, he returns periodically - but in this performance, from the hushed silence before a note was heard and then from the soft, gentle glow of the second violins with the opening theme, it was clear that this would be something exceptional.

Otaka's training has given him a particular affinity with Viennese music and, since Mahler's time in Vienna proved him one of the great conductors of the beginning of the 20th century, there was a distinct sense that this was an act of homage on Otaka's part. That was appropriate, given that, for Mahler, this symphony was as much an homage to the life force that lies at the core of everything as it was a contemplation of death. When the composer embarked on this symphony, he had been diagnosed with a fatal heart condition.

While conductors primarily view the Ninth as a valedictory work, Otaka seemed to offer it as one of acquiescence. This was not simply the reconciliation of Mahler with himself, with the thwarted ambition and tragedies of his life, but also of the two utterly different musical worlds the piece inhabits: the indulgently rich past and the austerely atonal future. Otaka succeeded in conveying the implicit logic of this colossal work, with its passionate first movement balanced perfectly by the vast, slow final movement, and its overall emotional outlook transformed by the irony and burlesque of the two central movements. He made the transitions from reverential to bombastic, from profundity to profanity and back again, part of a natural organic process.

With the BBCNOW musicians playing as if these were their own lives on the line, the passion and commitment was total. This may not have been the definitive Mahler interpretation, but it could hardly have been more alive and compelling.