No previous instalment in Paavo Järvi’s Mahler cycle prepared me for the raw passion of this Ninth. The first movement’s major/minor episodes veer one to another wildly, with two distinct tempi that threaten incoherence in the movement’s convulsive climaxes. The hollowed-out D major of the coda offers more technical than emotional resolution, with a flute solo wandering over the abyss that harks back even more than usual to the ‘Bird of Death’ episode of the Second Symphony’s finale – only this time, there is to be no resurrection.

The centre cannot hold, and yes, the central movements are susceptible to the Yeatsian charge of ‘mere anarchy’. The wind band of the Frankfurt orchestra is as ‘rough and clumsy’ as Mahler could have wished, and the strings lay into the second theme with a passion as unbridled as it is unexpected after the slickly calculated transitions of earlier symphonies, before Järvi accelerates further to mark the strongest possible contrast with the sentimental gait of the third theme. Now limping, now falling forwards, the movement proceeds like a village sack race of bizarrely ill-matched participants. The devil takes the hindmost from the first bar of the third-movement fugue, too, but the orchestra hang on to his coat-tails, and Järvi seems determined to make the point that passing casualties of ensemble and coordination are written by Mahler into his chaotic syntax.

Even in the D flat major of the finale, repose is forsaken for the kind of plangent string tone that distinguishes the finale of Järvi’s Third. The usual considerations of irony or grief become irrelevant in the face of the coda’s grim determination, which reminded me in passing of Haitink’s recent way with the piece. Unfortunately, the implications of such an uneasy Ninth aren’t pursued by a completed Tenth; however it’s done – here, steadily and implacably, with some huge rhetorical caesuras that bely the Wagnerian continuity of the whole – the Adagio alone feels more than ever like a failure of commitment to a masterpiece. It makes a frustrating appendix to a patchy but rewarding Mahler cycle.