It is unfortunate for Jonathan Darlington and his Duisburger Philharmoniker that their well-intentioned but rather faceless account of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony should have presented itself for review alongside Manfred Honeck’s hugely charismatic presentation. I’m not claiming that Honeck isn’t without his indulgences, his Bernsteinesque audacities, but there is a voice and force of personality here that is totally lacking in Darlington’s reading and, in the history of Mahler performances, I think it is clear that to represent Mahler you need to some extent to be Mahler – or at least to share his bigness of utterance.

And Honeck’s account is big, bigger and biggest on pretty much every count. You have to possess a temperament compatible with Mahler’s own to take the opening ‘Trauermarsch’ quite so broadly. The martial trumpeter’s ‘last post’, with its characteristic quickening in the tail, is terrifically authentic-sounding, the lachrymose march as drab as it is grave. It’s the character of the orchestral sound, the tawdry band coloration, that eludes Darlington. And Honeck has fantastic instinct for Mahler’s nodal points – those key moments where all the energy is concentrated. You could argue that his entire performance is overly expansive (a full five minutes longer than Darlington’s), that its weightiness sometimes compromises its momentum; but, architecturally speaking, the second movement, for instance, does feel like the flip side of the first movement – or, to put it another way, an angry response to it – and if you compare that extraordinary ‘eye of the storm’ moment in solo cellos, Honeck achieves an air of stasis that totally passes Darlington by.

Mahler was always fretful that conductors would take the enormous central Scherzo too fast, that those momentous horn-topped cessations – moments where all nature seems to stop and listen – would not achieve the panoramic awe he so startlingly wrote into the score. Honeck’s Pittsburgh Symphony (as with their fabulous account of the Third Symphony – 11/11) are in a different league to Darlington’s Duisburger Philharmoniker. Pittsburgh’s first horn is as spectacular as any on disc (yes, even Bernstein’s Vienna Philharmonic principal) and, if you occasionally feel that Honeck might have encouraged a little more lightness and uplift in the mix, the Ländler episodes are charming, the rubatos suitably quirky and the Dionysian sprint to the finishing line quite hair-raising. Doubtless Gilbert Kaplan would approve of Darlington bringing in the Adagietto at under nine minutes – but it doesn’t ‘say’ anything; and if Honeck is overly fussy with the phrasing, he does give the movement a sense of breathless rapture, with dynamics evaporating to less than a whisper where Mahler has his players barely graze the strings in the most rapt of glissandos.

Bernstein’s famous DG recording – as perfect a Mahler recording as I know – will always hold pride of place in any collection but if you are tempted to follow Honeck (and I would be) on his Mahler odyssey, then you will count his passing indulgences in this Fifth as part and parcel of a burgeoning individuality.