Under their founder and chief conductor Ivan Fischer the Budapest Festival Orchestra have always stood out from the international crowd. The sound is distinctive, the music-making personal. And “personal”, as we know, is the only viable way to Mahler’s heart. Stylistically, Fischer is right on the money. He has a keen nose for Mahler’s particular brand of tempo rubato – the ebb and flow of the music, the way it speaks, or rather sings; the bucolic and melodramatic elements of the score are vividly conflicted; and best of all Fischer really breathes in the atmosphere of Mahler’s precipitous flight to eternity. The second theme of the first movement, which Mahler requests enter tentatively, shyly, does exactly that – Fischer’s violins are barely audible, a rosy horizon briefly glimpsed through this bleak and forbidding landscape.

Few take this first movement to the edge of possibility that Mahler so clearly envisaged. Fischer does not shirk the often reckless extremes of tempo and dynamics but nor does he throw caution to the four winds in the terrifying stampede to its cliff-hanging climax. Leonard Bernstein is probably still alone in doing just that. But there are many other compensations here: a great sense of logic and line, a second movement whose homespun accenting belongs to a bygone era, likewise the close-harmony trumpets in the trio of the third movement so touchingly redolent of another time, another place.

But the crowning glory is, as it should be, the finale – and it is here that Fischer, his performers and his engineers, really excel. The “special effects” of Mahler’s elaborate Judgement Day fresco have rarely been so magically realised. The offstage horns are so breathtakingly remote as to suggest the world of the living left far behind. Moments of quite extraordinary stasis precede the sounding of the Dies irae and the hushed entry of the chorus. And come the peroration (resplendent with fabulous horns), Fischer knows that it is with that final crescendo of the chorus and only then that the heavens really open. Impressive.