When he was chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, Riccardo Chailly was a regular visitor to London. This, though, was his first appearance in the UK since he moved to Leipzig in 2004 to take charge of the opera and the Gewandhaus Orchestra; he is the first conductor for more than 30 years to hold both posts.

The orchestra may have changed but it's clear that Chailly's musical inclinations have not. He has always been a superb Mahler interpreter, one of the best there has ever been, and this Barbican concert consisted of just one work, the Seventh Symphony.

It's a piece often regarded as problematic, with a finale whose almost naive optimism is difficult to square with the highly wrought succession of movements preceding it. The five-movement plan lacks a slow movement, instead placing at its centre a scherzo flanked by the two curious evocations that Mahler called Nachtmusik. But Chailly revels in the challenge, and it's hard to imagine the symphony presented in a more coherent and convincing way than he delivered it here. He sees it as a psychologically complex sequence that gradually moves from the minatory march rhythms and introspection of the first movement, through a series of surreal visions in the central triptych of movements, to the celebrations of the last, whose extrovert qualities do not need to be justified but should simply be taken for what they are: a glorious affirmation.

The central European sound of the Leipzig orchestra - with its fabulously secure brass, neat, lively woodwind and unflashily articulate strings - is not one that we have often heard in Mahler; it casts different perspectives on the scoring. Chailly also emphasises the sometimes raw-boned textures, viewing the Seventh as the most forward-looking of the Mahler canon. Hearing this performance, it was easy to understand why the young Schoenberg so admired the work, and to realise how close to his own early music this strange piece really is.