By Jonathan Blumhofer

Sir Simon Rattle’s latest traversal of Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is something special; Pianist Aurélien Pontier’s stylish disc is a celebration of the music of fin de siècle Vienna.

Sir Simon Rattle is no stranger to Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. He recorded it in Birmingham in 1989 and twice in Berlin, where the score served as the main item on his final concert as music director of that city’s Philharmonic Orchestra.

Yet for all the similarities between those earlier accounts – Rattle opts for the Andante movement to come second, not third, eschews the third hammer blow in the finale, and keeps his timings within about four minutes of each other – none of his previous tapings pack the emotional wallop or evince quite the attention to color and detail that emerge on his latest traversal, this time with his newest orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony.

Indeed, what we’ve got here is something special. Though it might be considered a summation of sorts, given Rattle’s age (he’s now 69) and stature as one of the great Mahlerians of the last century, this is a Sixth that pulses with freshness and life.

The opening movement drives smartly, its implacable march figures pushing ahead, yes – but also unfolding with a surprising lightness of touch: this is music in which, above all, everything speaks. The so-called Alma subject is lively and vivacious, the development vigorous. Most striking is the transparency of the orchestra’s playing in the “nature interlude,” which only becomes more pristine as that episode proceeds.

Those same, delicate qualities mark much of the Andante, whose tie-ins to the environmental allusions (not to mention the soaring Alma theme) of the previous Allegro also emerge thoughtfully. To be sure, Rattle makes as cogent a case for this ordering of the middle movements as any conductor before him, while also capturing the music’s air of wonder and repose with heartfelt, natural precision.

Given this, the return to the volatile world of the Scherzo comes as an abrupt surprise. For brusqueness and urgency, the Bavarians deliver. Also, sonority: the ensemble teases out the weird radiance of the first Trio beautifully and, throughout, the movement’s counterpoint dances.

Much the same goes for the flawlessly paced finale, with its vivid plays of tonal, textural, and thematic contrasts, as well as explosive climaxes. Most stirring are the marches that emerge in the aftermath of the movement’s cataclysmic breakdowns. They bounce and swagger each time, until finally felled by the last, annihilating blast.

Over it all, Rattle’s firm command of the music’s structure means that his is as coherent a rendering of this music as they come. Nothing dawdles, nothing rushes; everything feels and sounds eminently right (including the final crash, in which the Bavarians’ ensemble is perfectly unified).

There are, of course, no shortage of great Mahler Sixths on disc: Barbirolli’s with the Hallé, Bernstein’s with Vienna Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas’s with the San Francisco Symphony. Rattle’s from Munich belongs among them.

Has any city quite captured the musical imagination of artists (and audiences) quite like fin de siècle Vienna? Pianist Aurélien Pontier doesn’t think so. His new album, Vienna: Joyful Apocalypse surveys the city’s enthusiasm for dance, longing, and decay with a 75-minute-long program made up of mostly familiar fare, some of it in unexpected arrangements, all of it dispatched with warmth and style.

Ultimately (and, maybe, predictably), Pontier’s disc is a celebration of the waltz. The oldest of those on offer, chronologically, belong to Franz Schubert. The apparent simplicity of his “Kupelwieser-Walzer” and the Waltz in B minor (Op. 18, no. 6) form a striking contrast with a pair by Tchaikovsky (the more extroverted “Valse-scherzo” and the bittersweet “Valse sentimentale”) and Fritz Kreisler’s melancholy “Liebesleid” (heard here in Rachmaninoff’s piano arrangement).

The latter composer has the floor to himself, as it were, with his whimsical “Polka de W.R.” while another keyboard virtuoso, Franz Liszt, makes a haunting appearance in the A-flat major movement from the Valses oubliées.

Otherwise, there’s no shortage of fireworks in the adaptations of Strauss fare Pontier assays. Adolf Schulz-Evler’s splashy Arabesken über “An der schönen, blauen Donau” and Alfred Grünfeld’s Soirée de Vienne, a paraphrase of themes from Die Fledermaus, sparkle. So does Otto Schulhof’s reworking of the Pizzicato Polka, which, remarkably, Pointier gets to sound somewhat more characterful in pianistic form than for strings.

The quirkiest entry is Pontier’s arrangement of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Though he gets his instrument to sing, one misses the dynamic range and sonic weight of the original.

But the final pairing – of Schoenberg’s Klavierstück No. 6 and Ravel’s La valse – neatly centers the proceedings. The former’s fragments seem to coalesce in Pontier’s clean-textured account of the latter, which barrels through its crushing denouement and keeps going right over the edge, dancing all the way into the abyss.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.