Let’s begin at the end. The final page of the last, cataclysmically slow movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is one of the most famously death-haunted places in orchestral music, a moment in which the music slowly, achingly, bridges the existential gap between sound and silence, presence and absence, life and death. The very last bar is even marked, pianississimo, with a long pause – “ersterbend” (dying), as if its message wasn’t already clear enough.

As musical ideas that have dominated this movement, the whole symphony, and even other works by Mahler, dissolve into the ether – becoming slower, quieter, emptier, and more stunningly, breathtakingly etiolated and gossamer-thin in sound and substance – it all amounts to convincing evidence to support Leonard Bernstein’s view, shared by many of his conductor colleagues and listeners, too, that this music stands for a whole suite of deaths. There's Mahler’s own, since this is his last completed symphony, after he had witnessed the death of his daughter and when he knew that his life would be cut short by his heart condition. There's the death of tonality, which – in the musical context of 1910, this piece emblematically signals. It even heralds the death throes of the figure of the artist as hero in European culture.

The rest of the symphony, according to another Bernsteinian point of view, prefigues the jackboots of the world wars. And when you listen to Bernstein, or Claudio Abbado, or Herbert von Karajan, or the majority of contemporary interpreters of the Ninth Symphony, you are given no choice but to go on a journey through the veil to a glimpse of some other realm beyond worldly experience. I’ve described the end of Abbado’s performance with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the minutes of silence that follows it in this live recording, as one of the most revelatory, transformative experiences of my musical life. And I’m confident it will be for you as well when you watch the performance.

Yet there is another way of thinking about this music, and there’s another way of conducting it, hearing it, and experiencing it. It turns on whether you think of this piece as a hymn to the end of all things, or instead, as an ultimately affirmative love-song to life and to mortality. (It can be both at the same time, of course, but bear with me.) The reason that performance is so important in this piece is that a conductor’s view of the music, especially that final, slow movement, can take the symphony in different directions. Bruno Walter, a close friend of Mahler’s who conducted the Ninth’s posthumous premiere in 1912, performed and recorded the piece with Vienna Philharmonic in 1938. His finale takes just over 18 minutes, whereas Bernstein with the Israel Philharmonic takes half an hour. (It’s pure speculation, but Walter may have conducted the piece even more swiftly in 1912, since his interpretations tended to get slower in his later musical life.) That goes beyond a mere difference of tempo, it makes the piece a radically different musical and emotional entity. Listen to the very opening of both performances to hear what I mean: Walter’s almost vibrato-less violins make a single phrase out of that ascent to the turn figure that will dominate the whole movement, in a breath that you could sing. But Bernstein and his players wring a feverish intensity from every note, and they turn that opening idea into a catalogue of trauma instead of a single musical statement – and so it goes on, throughout the movement.

The finale is only the most extreme example of a tendency you can hear throughout the symphony. Seemingly, there’s much more evidence to support the hymn-to-death approach: the halting rhythm you hear right at the start of the symphony in the horn, which becomes a massively disturbing dark fanfare in the rest of the huge first movement, has been interpreted as a transliteration of Mahler’s faltering heartbeat, the rustic-grotesque of the scherzo is a sort of surreal, Brueghel-esque dark pastoral, and the third movement, the Rondo-Burleske, spits out its contrapuntal ferocity with sardonic energy, in what could be Mahler’s “screw-you guys” to those who said he couldn’t write polyphony (in fact this whole symphony sounds out Mahler’s most subtle polyphony of motive, theme and harmony, in ways that really do prefigure Schoenberg's and Webern’s music of the late 19-teens).

But consider this: the sighing idea that you hear in the second violins at the start of the symphony, two notes and an interval (F sharp-E) that are at the heart of the opening movement and the whole symphony’s melodic material, is connected to something rather surprising: a waltz by Johann Strauss that Mahler certainly knew, called Enjoy Life. Mahler makes the thematic link explicit later on in the movement, and clearest of all in its closing bars (listen to this excellent summary of the connections made by this YouTube user) and he does so with tenderness rather than irony. The trauma of the climaxes in this unprecedented first movement is not in doubt, but what’s at stake is what they mean: are they the sounds of a catastrophe that’s about to happen? Or are they the result of a life-force straining every fibre of its being to resist the inevitable, and to relish instead the fragility of life’s pleasures? There is the same dichotomy at play in the scherzo, in which you can interpret the tensions between playfulness and warped, hobbled dance-rhythms as a struggle to hold on to an elusive, simple joyfulness. And in the Rondo-Burleske, in the middle of the storm of counterpoint, there are epiphanies of stillness and visionary escape, as the solo trumpet calls out a melodic figure that will go on to define the next, final movement.

All that means there’s another way of thinking about the finale: it’s music that tries not to depict a musical or philosophical death, but instead, does everything it can to hold on to existence. On that last page, there’s a quote from the fourth of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, accompanying the words “the day is beautiful”. Again, it’s an image of hanging on to the beauties of life even in the face of death, rather than a morbid fascination with what lies beyond.

Yet whatever decisions conductors make about Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, it’s up to us listeners to make of the piece what we want. And what’s thrilling about this music, and the performances below, is that it can be more than one thing simultaneously. One final thought, maybe the most obvious of all: far from going gently into a sort of pre-deathly contemplation, Mahler was full of plans, action, and music in the years when he was writing the Ninth Symphony. He was taking up his post at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, writing Das Lied von der Erde, preparing for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, and writing, but not completing, what would truly be his last symphony, the Tenth. That’s another danger of thinking about that last page of the Ninth Symphony as the end of Mahler’s compositional life. It’s not: for Mahler, and maybe for us, it should be an insight into life – albeit a life transformed after the intensity of what you’ll have been through after listening to any complete performance of his symphony – rather than a leaving of it.

Five key recordings

1. Bruno Walter/Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: From 1938, this recording lives and breathes a Mahlerian performance practice that we can now only distantly recreate. It’s essential listening.

2. Leonard Bernstein/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: One of the most highly-charged of Bernstein’s Mahler performances, and his only appearance with Karajan’s Berliners – the electricity of the encounter thrills and disturbs through every note.

3. Claudio Abbado/Lucerne Festival Orchestra: A performance that both travels to another realm of experience, but is also full of an irresistible worldly love, of lyricism, of earthiness, of energy.

4. Jonathan Nott/Bamberg Symphony Orchestra: It’s conducted and played with fastidious and immaculate attention to detail, but Nott’s performance also reaches the heights of Mahlerian emotion and extremity.

5. Roger Norrington/Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra: This won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it’s an important and radical vision of this symphony, stripped not just of vibrato, but any emotional histrionics. And Norrington’s tempos and timings are closer to Walter’s than anyone else’s – but still not quite as quick …

• Donald Runnicles conducts Mahler's Ninth Symphony at the BBC Proms on 4 August with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.