Erwin Stein’s arrangement of the Fourth set the precedent for attempts to compress and deconstruct Mahler that have more recently included two chamber versions of the Ninth and Matthew Herbert’s ‘Mahler X’. From the discomfiting way that the strings of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra slide down icy portamentos into yawning glissandos during the opening minutes of the Adagio, you might anticipate that here is another experiment designed at once to domesticate and disorient. But Michelle Castelletti’s arrangement doesn’t turn out like that.

Having taken Deryck Cooke’s completion as the basis for her edition, Castelletti slims down the orchestra, not the argument, insinuating that in his later works Mahler was already engaged on a project of deconstructing himself. Meanwhile John Storgårds always cultivates legato, connects notes and episodes, privileges coherence over discontinuity and reminds us that the composer’s sketches preserved at least a single thread of melody running through almost the entire symphony. Outstanding throughout, hornist Ilkka Puputti lends a glowing aurora borealis to the Adagio’s piercing cry of anguish. Taken very slowly indeed, the coda itself inches its way towards provisional closure as if (rather plausibly) Mahler was beginning his last and in many ways most radical symphony by rewriting the finale of the previous one.

The stylistic ground of the first Scherzo is more uncertain, pitched (again not inauthentically) somewhere between Johann Strauss, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, and decked out with gaudy triangle and cymbal trappings in the manner of Rudolf Barshai’s Soviet-tinted orchestration. But it works. There is the lazy drawl of an authentic Mahler scherzo about Storgårds’ refined direction, the queasy movement between waltz and march, between nostalgia and parody. The orchestra play as if they had just broken off rehearsals of the Fifth.

Castelletti’s version passes one important Mahlerian test insofar as it sheds a wan light of revelation on previous symphonies. The ‘Purgatorio’ sounds more than ever like a caustic rewrite of ‘Von der Jugend’ from Das Lied (hardly an original observation: Cooke himself made this comparison back in 1961). Borrowed from the Eighth as well as the arrangements made for the Society for Private Musical Performances by Schoenberg and his colleagues such as Stein, piano and harmonium fill out the more problematically fragmented textures of the second Scherzo, while Storgårds recaptures the whirling nihilism of Das Lied’s opening song with much teasing rubato.

Cooke himself saw the Tenth as finally affirmative but Castelletti’s telling use of tam-tam in the coda recalls the closing section of the Pathétique Symphony – another Mahlerian touchstone – and offers only the most fragile consolation. However you hear the Tenth, you’ll hear it differently after experiencing this one.