The sound is distinctive, the music-making personal. … the crowning glory is, as it should be, the finale… The special effects" of Mahler's elaborate Judgement Day fresco have rarely been so magically realised. The offstage horns are so breathtakinglyremote as to suggest the world of the living left far behind. Moments of quite extraordinary stasis precede the sounding of the Dies irae and the hushed entry of the chorus. And come the peroration (resplendent with fabulous horns), Fischer knows that itis with that final crescendo of the chorus and only then that the heavens really open. "