Combining finely honed performances with unimpeachable sound engineering and imaginative design, this state-of-the-art production deserves to transcend doubts about the viability of the programme itself. ‘The Mahler Album’ is what it says on the front of the booklet but the only work presented complete is a tweaked version of Beethoven’s Quartetto serioso. In a previous guise, the ensemble recorded this for BIS in the mid-1990s alongside Mahler’s similar fleshing-out of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Mahler justified such renderings on the grounds that ‘In a large space the four voices are lost and do not speak to the listener with the power that the composer wanted to give them. I give them this power by strengthening the voices.’ As in the past, today’s chamber music mavens are likely to find the results overblown, although group members must have mulled over every bar in detail to secure an agreed line on the finer points of articulation, vibrato and so forth.

The notion of pairing Mahler’s Beethoven arrangement with his own Adagietto is not new. Kenneth Slowik placed them alongside Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in a collection employing instruments from the Smithsonian collection and a playing style self-consciously modelled on what we know of relevant ‘period’ practice. With her crack band of 22 reinforced by extra players, Candida Thompson and friends give the Adagietto more room to breathe, embracing the widest range of tempi and dynamics within a 10'35" frame (the indicated timing of 11 minutes is oddly wide of the mark). New to me, though dating from 1971, is the string-ensemble version of the opening movement of the Tenth, a reduction which might be thought to add further confusion to that score’s vexed performance history, however committed the music-making.

The Mahler slow movements are presented as outer panels, the Beethoven in the middle. Over to you.