In the interview accompanying the Eighth Symphony, Paavo Järvi confesses that its first part is ‘not my favourite music’ and, in truth, you can tell from his traffic-cop act from the opening. The line sags into ‘Infirma nostri corporis’ and is only superficially lifted by pointed, quasi-Baroque choral articulation. The great cry of ‘Accende’ (or ‘Ak-Zende’ – German Latin in Frankfurt) is just the preparation for the recapitulation, and the coda’s stairways to heaven are emphatically metronomic.

Järvi is more convinced by Part Two, but I am not by his performance of it, or by his theory that Mahler’s setting of Goethe is an expression of the composer’s need ‘to be loved for what he is’. He adopts an arm’s-length approach to music that surely needs to be believed in if it isn’t to sound like an inflated if efficiently strung-together compendium of late-Romantic clichés.

This is a shame because on a technical level the Eighth is – as with all the other performances in the cycle – highly accomplished. Less so the filming: the cameras offer either close-up or side-on views of the soloists, and they could have made more of Järvi’s intelligent disposition of the two choirs either side of the organ console (the boys are placed in a side gallery to stage right) to illustrate Mahler’s neo-Handelian choral counterpoint; instead, close attention is paid to a particular blonde soprano in the front row. Each part is allotted only one track, and the applause is not tracked to the film: the place erupts in cheers as the soloists walk off the platform, which can’t be right.

The driving pulse to the Seventh’s first movement is superficially similar to that of the Eighth, but Järvi is much more comfortable with this symphony’s mutation of Baroque-shaped gestures into expressionist parodies of themselves: sarcasm over sincerity. Even the movement’s central idyll presses on as if trying to catch up with Webern’s Op 6 Pieces, and the Scherzo flashes by. Many of its extremes of dynamic and articulation are moderated in haste, though that impression may also be due to a compressed and spotlit sound mix from a hall in Wiesbaden that seems small for both the piece and the orchestra. Järvi even imparts a plausible urgency to the fourth-movement serenade by encouraging some tender phrasing outside a swift basic tempo, and the finale is a rococo riot which laughs in the face of good form and good taste. Overall the Seventh belongs with the other mid-period symphonies as the high point of the cycle.