MAHLER'S TENTH LACKS FINISHING TOUCHES.

Byline: David Mermelstein Correspondent

IN A WAY, it's the highest honor we can bestow on a dead composer - listening to all his music. Sometimes, that means performing works he hoped would go unplayed. Or digging up juvenilia he was certain he'd long ago destroyed. Occasionally, it means picking up the pen when he left a work unfinished.

Such intervention is not always possible, of course - think of Schubert's ``Unfinished'' Symphony - but there are several cases in which acolytes have risen to fill the void. Franco Alfano finished what Puccini could not and gave us the performing edition of ``Turandot'' we most often hear.

Deryck Cooke, an English musicologist, did something similar with the fragments Mahler left for a Tenth Symphony. (Pedants will consider ``Das Lied von der Erde'' the composer's Ninth Symphony, his Symphony No. 9 as Symphony No. 10 and this work as Symphony 11, but no matter.) Working over nearly 20 years, and adding to efforts already undertaken by others, Cooke pieced together Mahler's scraps and, when necessary, added to them.

In this endeavor, Cooke had the backing of Mahler's widow, Alma, and since the mid-1960s, when Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra made the first recording of the piece, the symphony has had notable advocates, most recently Simon Rattle. And yet there are still churls out there (you're reading one now) who've never been able to embrace this symphony as ``real'' Mahler, try as they might.

So perhaps that's why one felt less than overwhelmed at Thursday's Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, in which the gifted, 29-year-old English conductor Daniel Harding led the orchestra in Cooke's version of Mahler's final symphonic statements.

The work certainly runs to Mahlerian length, about 80 minutes, and it uses Mahlerian forces - large choirs of strings, woodwinds and brasses complemented by a percussion battery including two sets of kettle drums, a bass drum, a military drum, glockenspiel, triangle and (my favorite) twigs. But though the work possesses scope, it lacks vision.

It's tough to make any Mahler symphony cohere, but the task is next to impossible here. The composer himself didn't live long enough to work it out, and Cooke, whatever his talents, is no Mahler. That leaves the power of persuasion to the conductor, and Harding, his obvious talents notwithstanding, doesn't yet have the ability for such a feat.

With its formal divisions occasionally eliding, the five-movement work is tricky thematically and structurally, and there is the ever-present danger of allowing Mahler's music to sound like nothing more than a series of atmospheric episodes. Which is pretty much what happened under Harding.

Under Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic strings have grown increasingly taut, but Mahler calls for lushness, and those sonorities were missing in this performance. On the other hand, the woodwinds sounded agreeably fresh, and the percussion and brasses were suitably pungent and plangent, respectively.

Harding's grip improved as the symphony progressed, and he was at his best in the latter parts of the Finale, which he led touchingly, the coda gentle and heartfelt. There is little doubt of this conductor's bright future, and you can anticipate his increasing facility in Mahler as he matures.

DANIEL HARDING CONDUCTS THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC - Two and one half stars

What: One of the world's best young conductors tackles Mahler's knotty Tenth Symphony.

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 8 tonight.

Tickets: $15 to $125. [phone] or www.laphil.com.

In a nutshell: Young Daniel Harding is a talented conductor, but one not quite ready for coping with Mahler's sprawl.