You could almost call it Mahlerian

Mahler’s 10th Symphony is the symphony that never was, never should be -- but is. It’s the symphony that Mahler freaks dread but cannot keep away from. It’s the symphony that young conductors, in particular, turn to seemingly for no other reason than to torment the Mahler-obsessed.

Now we can thank Daniel Harding, the whiz-kid British conductor who led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a sweeping account of the 10th at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday night, for a fresh round of Mahlerian torments.

The 10th brings out one insecurity after another, beginning with the biggest of them all: mortality. Mahler, a superstitious composer, had hoped to beat the Curse of the Nine. Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Dvorak never got past nine symphonies. (Schubert and Beethoven began 10ths but didn’t get far; Bruckner finished two of the three movements of his Ninth.)

Instead of a ninth, Mahler wrote a symphonic song cycle, “Das Lied von der Erde,” which ends with one of the saddest farewells to life in all art. Then, thinking himself freed from the curse, he faced his mortality unflinchingly in his death-haunted Ninth Symphony, music profoundly somber and of unearthly beauty.

The 10th takes off from there, its five movements meant to express his anguish at midlife (he had just learned that his young, adored wife, Alma, was having an affair), his wariness of life’s battles, his railing against its injustices and his painful internalizing of them, and finally his clinging to and embracing the future with a grasp so overwhelmingly potent that we still shiver in its musical presence. But the grim reaper would not be toyed with. Before he could finish, Mahler was struck with an infection of the heart (!) and died in 1911, at age 50.

The first movement was close enough to completion to make performance practical, as was the short, crucial, turning-point central movement. The rest is torso, but torso enough to get a good idea of what Mahler intended with this potentially groundbreaking symphony. Well-meaning editors, like paleontologists with dinosaur bones, have supplied the idea of the flesh.

The arguments for and against performing the 10th are well rehearsed. The symphony is a first draft and not what Mahler, a compulsive reviser, would have written. The two scherzo movements and finale were not orchestrated and in places lack even harmonies. Mahler was an innovative, revolutionary composer, but editors make choices based on what he had done before. Still, it gives us a vivid idea of where Mahler was headed. It contains music of such heart-rending anguish and heartbreaking beauty that living without it might be too painful.

And yet Harding’s well-done performance Thursday night of Deryck Cooke’s well-done performing version proved, as performances of this symphony always do, a huge act of denial. However good the music, it can never be good enough, never be Mahler. Most mature Mahler conductors accept only the first movement.

It’s different with the young -- unwilling to live with disappointment, dismissive of mortality. Zubin Mehta, in his early 30s, gave the Philharmonic premiere of the 10th in 1973. An even younger Simon Rattle conducted it here in the ‘80s (and Rattle remains today the one major Mahlerian conductor who continues to advocate the work). Harding, once Rattle’s assistant in England at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, is not yet 30.

Harding’s approach to the 10th was embracing but not illuminating. Choosing the Cooke version, as opposed to one of the more flamboyant versions, by Clinton A. Carpenter and Remo Mazzetti Jr., only enhances the impression of artifice. It sounds too much like the Mahler we know, not the one we can never know. Carpenter and Mazzetti don’t try quite so hard to fool us; they are more speculative. A too-realistic wax sculpture of a beloved figure gives you the creeps; a fanciful sculpture, however, sometimes supplies the essence of a personality.

The 10th is full of difficult, yearning music. The first movement is visionary. The scherzos are crazy. The last movement has a lyric melody so deep and ingratiating as to make a 10th Symphony skeptic almost grateful for all the artifice necessary to allow us to hear it.

Harding’s got technique to burn, and he found his way through all the 10th’s thorny passages with disarming confidence and seeming ease. The Philharmonic was in good form. The violas, placed in front of the cellos, added a particular richness to the first movement. The brass had a strong night.

Through it all, you could almost believe that Mahler wrote this symphony, that he unloosed and then tamed his demons, that he survived. If only he had.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall,

111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. today

Price: $15 to $125

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com