Following the example of Berlioz (and before him Beethoven in the Pastoral), the central subject of the First Symphony (and the subsequent nine) is of course Mahler himself. We need not court accusations of revisionism to hear the First as a nakedly autobiographical musical retelling of small-town childhood on the edge of nature, teenage years on the verge of self-discovery and the triumphal progress of his early twenties, from promising student in big-city Vienna to operatic maestro in Kassel and then Budapest.

On the original issue of this 2007 performance in a four-CD set in 2011, much of the heavy lifting to illustrate all of this was accomplished by an audio biography (in German only) devised by Jörg Handstein, the editorial head of the Bavarian RSO. Standing now on its own terms, the performance lacks a crucial degree of character even compared with the similarly flowing traversal by the same orchestra under Rafael Kubelík (recently brushed up by DG, 1/19). But then the Czech conductor knew better than most the woods where Mahler was coming from.

The broad outlines of the performance are near-identical to previously issued Jansons accounts from Oslo (Simax, 7/03) and Amsterdam (RCO Live, 7/07), also edited from live concerts. There is a Bavarian solidity to the rough Ländler rhythms of the Scherzo, and the slow movement’s night processional – hardly less a translation in sound of Rembrandt’s Night Watch than the explicitly indebted first Nachtmusik of the Seventh – is beautifully rendered in subdued timbres, and Jansons judges to perfection the ‘Jewish’ interventions of the village band, though they are anticipated and italicised so heavily that Mahler’s mit Ironie direction loses much of its force. Momentum and a definite sense of purpose are asserted by the finale’s forthright opening, but again I feel that Jansons overcooks the transition to the movement’s big reveal, the Tchaikovskian second theme which is the goal of the symphony up to that point.

Still, the point is well made that less than a decade separates Mahler’s First from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, and for once the influence flows from east to west and not the other way around. Further stagy pauses require the urgency and tension imparted by a Bernstein or a Tennstedt if they are not to stretch Mahler’s already diffuse form out of shape. Otherwise they count for little more than artful brushstrokes in an unpeopled landscape, more Canaletto than Rembrandt.