Modern listeners tend to take Mahler’s proud claim for the Eighth as his greatest achievement with a soup-spoon of salt. After all, he never lived to hear the Ninth or Das Lied von der Erde. It takes a special kind of performance to make one reflect that, in fact, he may have been on to something. For all its passing frailties – almost inevitable in a one-off and apparently unpatched concert – this is one of those performances. The uneditable audience reaction at the end of both parts was (I recall from the occasion) entirely spontaneous as well as unfashionably occasioned by a drinks interval.

The quietest passage in the symphony – the preludial scene-setting to open Part 2 – might also be the most telling. The Poco adagio tread is a little slower than usual, drawing out a sadder and wiser kinship with the Fourth’s slow movement, the better also to inflect its wind lines with expressionist angst. The cadence point two minutes in is deftly anticipated rather than solemnised in the manner of Bernstein, and Jurowski pulls back the trombones to bring out the most vulnerable element of the chord in the bassoons. The hush of expectancy in the string tremolo at this point outdoes even Rattle – again all the more effectively setting up the outpouring of neoclassically formed feeling to which Mahler returned in the Adagio of the Ninth.

Here and throughout Part 2, the ambitions of the piece as an opus summum of not only Mahler’s output but music history from Bach to the future have rarely been more effectively realised. The hesitant, broken – and impeccably articulated – syllables of the chorus picking their way through Goethe’s rocky landscape bring to mind Schoenberg’s Israelites lost in exile halfway through Moses und Aron. Stephen Gadd picks up the thread with a magnificently declaimed Pater Ecstaticus before Matthew Rose replies as an iron-black Alberich to his Wotan. Berlioz, Massenet, Strauss: all come and go in the score, brought together by Mahler (and Jurowski) as if invited back for a retrospective of his triumphs as a conductor (such as Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, embedded within the cantabile of Doctor Marianus and the affecting appeal of Anne Schwanewilms’s Gretchen).

Does it all add up? Very much so, if you don’t come looking for the spiritual testament offered by Tennstedt and Bernstein or the solo-vocal burnish of the casts for Solti and Dudamel. Despite the original placing of choirs right around the Festival Hall’s stalls horseshoe and some staged manoeuvres of singers through the course of Part 2, the engineering and acoustic fall short of the wraparound experience achieved by Rattle in Birmingham and Dudamel in Los Angeles, but there is no lack of spatial separation, ringing textual clarity or contrapuntal definition to the choral lines in Part 1 – or sheer weight of numbers behind the sturdy momentum of the symphony’s opening and its ecstatically prolonged apotheosis. The LPO Live label already boasts one Eighth – Tennstedt, live in the same venue in 1991 (6/11) – worthy of a place at the summit of the Eighth’s discography. Now it has a second.