Gustav Mahler lite? The composer conceived this sometimes boisterous, ultimately transcendent song cycle on a symphonic scale. But in this season’s performances, the Dallas Symphony’s music director Fabio Luisi plays the piece with instrumental forces drastically diminished. Rainer Riehn, who finalized the arrangement undertaken six decades before by Arnold Schoenberg, has likened their chamber version to a woodcut after a master’s painting, copping to a crudeness of contour and lack of color of which the reduction is not guilty. The soloists are Stuart Skelton, tenor, and Tamara Mumford, contralto, in the top tier of interpreters of this music today. —M.G.