Alan Gilbert’s Mahler may be new to Gramophone readers, but the opening is full of a familiar ache – the Andante comodo tempo, the anacrusis in the first theme, the portamento in the violins all perfectly judged in the halting start to a journey taken almost reluctantly in the here and now rather than remembered from afar. Among familiar and celebrated accounts, therefore, Gilbert is aligned with Abbado rather than Haitink (or Bernstein rather than Giulini). Like Abbado (and very few others), he is exceedingly mindful of Mahler’s markings. My one query arises at fig 13, where he inserts a general pause, just as Karajan did, to prevent the end of the cello line clashing with the horn anacrusis – which Mahler clearly intends them to, especially when the movement’s first marked full pause is only 10 bars away.

On a technical level this must, I think, be the finest recording the work has received. Every note is audible – and the achievement of the orchestra (still more extraordinary than that of the engineers) is to play them and show how they all matter. So often the string parts overlap and finish each other’s sentences, as in a Haydn quartet or a Bach fugue (examples of which Mahler was studying intensively while composing the Ninth). In this case a studio recording is a distinct advantage, especially since the emotional charge hardly drops after the opening of the work. Gilbert juggles the many tempi of the inner movements to whip up the requisite hysteria (this isn’t a performance for those who must have their banality served on a silver salver) before offering true catharsis with the Adagio. Even in the last bars, the pulse and grammar of the music hold – just about; reminding us that at the beginning of the Tenth the violas pick up where they leave off here.

This first recording of Gilbert conducting Mahler is rather more than work in progress, but recent broadcasts of the Third (from Hamburg) and Das klagende Lied (from New York) suggest that we have much to look forward to. It is as exhausting and purifying an experience as any 80 minutes spent in your listening room has the right to be.