Rattle, Mahler . . . truly a festival

Like the festival from which it was drawn,

Carnegie Hall Celebrates Berlin

goes off in so many directions at 9 p.m. Monday on WHYY TV12, the only apt title would be vulgar and unwieldy, like "The Simon Rattle Show with special guests Gustavo Dudamel and

The Rite of Spring

."

Cynicism is impossible, though, because everything in this blithely heterogeneous segment of PBS's Great Performances ought to be seen somewhere on public television. Save the date, in fact. Get your brain in some sort of high-tone Ed Sullivan mode and take the show as it comes.

The main attraction is an outstanding performance of Mahler's

Symphony No. 9

by Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. And in a series of bonuslike cuts that were also part of the Rattle residency late last year in New York, you see bits of a staged

Rite of Spring

ballet, plus the hot young Dudamel conducting movements of Bartok's

Concerto for Orchestra

with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra from Venezuela. All of it fell under the unlikely umbrella of Carnegie Hall's Berlin in Lights festival.

The Rattle/Mahler combination, a potent one for decades, took a gratifying leap seven years ago when he and the Berlin Philharmonic made a standard-setting recording of the Mahler

Symphony No. 10

. This performance of the Ninth is nearly its equal - and even eclipses, if slightly, the fine EMI download of a months-earlier live performance made in Berlin.

Written in the years before the composer's death with an alternately elegiac and world-ending sense of leave-taking, the

Symphony No. 9

has been a talisman of sorts in European culture; it was one of the last performances by the Vienna Philharmonic before the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria, after which this Jewish composer was banned.

The Berliners came late to the piece - neither of the great postwar conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan was keen on the composer's gargantuan symphonies, leaving the orchestra to learn it from guest conductors such as John Barbirolli and Leonard Bernstein. Then Karajan trumped them all with 1982 performances that were among his last bursts of glory.

Decades on the Mahler periphery punctuated by moments of blinding brilliance perhaps give the Berlin view a singularity that, under the guidance of Rattle (a born Mahlerian who projects the music's autobiographical elements from the inside out), renders a chiseled-in-granite conviction counterbalanced with an inner tension between the music's simultaneous events, suggesting the entire edifice could crumble at any moment.

It's in that war-from-within quality that Rattle finds a central strand in a symphony that can seem like two slow, lyrical meditations oddly separated by a pair of raucous dance-based movements. Because the first three movements seem more of a piece, the sense of release in the spiritual resignation of the final movement, built on Bach-like hymns, has even more power.

The video presentation feels somewhat compromised. The priority is to see Rattle from the perspective of the musicians, but that also means violin bows and shoulders getting in the way. Also, Rattle has rarely been photographed so unflatteringly. He's about getting the performance he wants at any cost - with an unpoetic stiff wrist on his baton arm plus agog facial tics - so that if you watched him with the sound turned down, you'd guess he had experienced something terrible and bizarre. The point, though, is that lightning is captured and bottled. Similar experiences have occurred in Philadelphia under Christoph Eschenbach and Klaus Tennstedt, but how often are they preserved?

The bonus cuts leave you wanting more. The Dudamel footage shows the conductor in typical hyperenergetic form, and may be a teaser for a later program specifically devoted to him next season. But the Berlin Philharmonic's staged

Rite of Spring

with student dancers at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights was never fully shot. Too bad, since the few glimpses of Royston Maldoom's choreography enter the music with a rarely seen specificity. Maldoom did the same project in Germany, and it's preserved in the film

Rhythm Is It,

available on

» READ MORE: www.rhythmisit.com

.