Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has become a somewhat elusive work of late. Is this down to a lack of belief in the piece or a lack of experience of it? In the early days of the Mahler revival, there were authoritative albeit contrasted recordings by Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer. There was also a superbly conducted Solti version for those in a search of a less encumbered view of what is (let us not forget) a young man’s quest. Provided you avoided Bernstein’s grotesquely self-regarding 1964 New York recording (dubbed ‘monstrous’ by Deryck Cooke, though nowadays sounding merely comic), you could hardly go wrong.

The problem facing all Mahler interpreters – though it barely seemed a problem for Mahler associates Walter, Klemperer and Oskar Fried, whose pioneering 1924 acoustic recording is now on CD – is the need to marry local accents with universal longings, gesture with flow, the personal with the symphonic. Was DG hoping that Boulez would provide the logic while the Vienna Philharmonic served up the local knowledge? His reading of the opening ‘Funeral Rites’ is not without sophistication. Mahler’s metronome mark is crotchet=84-92. Walter (and Rattle, in his occasionally glutinous account of the movement) choose a measured 80, Klemperer and Solti a brisker 88. Boulez opts for 84, a pulse he modifies, subtly and without undue exaggeration, in the nostalgic interludes. It is tastefully done, but to what end? It would be impertinent to suggest that Boulez does not entirely trust the music, let alone venerate it as the best (and worst) interpreters do. Yet the performance does seem short on personal engagement. The open, optimistic feel he brings to the exposition is not necessarily a problem if, by the end of ‘Funeral Rites’, a transformation has been enacted. Alas, not a great deal happens. Compare that with Walter and Klemperer, who conjure their own tragic impulse from the outset, or with Solti, whose imaginative refusal to re-establish the tempo primo at the recapitulation draws the music down towards tragedy.

Boulez and the VPO are charming in the Ländler but the third movement is too quick (Mahler asks for a ‘peaceful flowing motion’). This is not merely a paraphrase of the Wunderhorn song about St Anthony and the fishes; it is a movement, according to Mahler’s programme, in which the hero ‘despairs of himself and of God’. Klemperer’s account, chunky and abrasive, gets under your skin; the Boulez is too much on the surface.

The Urlicht and finale are problem-free, though here I have doubts about the recording. The choir has a somewhat sepulchral sound at first. Later, it is too distantly balanced to be on equal terms with the orchestra in the blaze of the resurrection hymn. The orchestra itself is well recorded. The understated playing of the trumpet’s cry of anguish at the end of ‘Funeral Rites’ and the blandness of the close-harmony trumpets in the third movement trio tell us more about the conducting than the engineering.