The Third was the first of Mahler’s symphonies to be recorded by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra back in the 1960s (I well remember Deryck Cooke’s enthusiastic review in these very pages), and the irony does not escape me that Jaap van Zweden will soon be taking up his appointment as the new music director of that esteemed ensemble. His Mahler Third could hardly be more different from Bernstein’s; and while comparisons are unavoidable, it is also perhaps a little unfortunate that the Bernstein account of this piece can surely lay claim to being the finest ever put on disc.

Technology, though, has moved on since then and first impressions of this live recording from Dallas are more than favourable – a big open soundscape for an epic symphony. All nature – human and otherwise – is here, and nowhere in Mahler’s output is the pantheist in his soul a cause for greater rejoicing. Indeed, in the outer movements it is quite overwhelming. The first is flabbergasting in sonic terms alone, and while van Zweden and the Dallas Symphony keep their grip on the bigger picture, the seismic shocks and upheavals (not least in the opening pages) are nothing like as startling or as arresting as they need to be. In general the sound is too blended, ‘softened’, for my taste and the raucous woodwind choir (in need of a little focus-pulling) are never as pungent as I’d like them in sections such as the notorious ‘Rabble’ episode, which sounds so orderly when you compare Bernstein or Manfred Honeck’s recent account which, sonically speaking, is as good as it gets.

Van Zweden is also too impatient to fully appreciate those blinding vistas which open up at the culmination of summer’s inexorable march on winter. When the moment returns in the coda he is again pressing forwards where surely there must be a moment of feeling transfixed by what we see (from what we hear) before the euphoric presto of the closing bars again takes our breath away.

The assorted flora and fauna of the inner movements are well attended with fragrant and elegant playing (the closing page or two of the second movement especially) and the lontano effect of the distant posthorn solos in the third are suitably transfixing, carried on the gentle rustling of tremolando violins.

Personally I prefer a darker contralto sound than Kelley O’Connor gives us in the Nietzsche ‘Midnight Song’ setting and van Zweden is not mindful of Mahler’s markings Sehr langsam and Misterioso (very slow; mysterious) – it is neither. But at least he doesn’t subscribe to the view, fashionably held now, that Mahler’s direction Hinaufziehen (‘drawn upwards’) for the oboe and cor anglais’ semitonal bird cries should in fact be taken literally to mean an obtrusive and awkward-to-achieve slide. When that’s what he wanted (as in the Ninth Symphony’s Rondo-Burleske) he marked it as such.

Of all Mahler’s adagios the final movement of the Third is surely the greatest – well, it is when you listen again to that first Bernstein recording. That has never been equalled in my opinion, though Chailly and Honeck are both beautiful and inspiring. Van Zweden falls short of what I would call that extra dimension: intensity, elevation. You somehow sense as trumpets and trombones quietly, heart-stoppingly begin the final ascent that van Zweden is not headed for that special place that Bernstein and Chailly so naturally access. He never quite attains the ascendancy. And the final pages, with their timpani ostinato, are too loud (marked only forte), as if seeking to encourage the cheers – which frankly is not what you want to hear at the end of this movement, indeed this symphony.