Michael Schønwandt’s own programme notes are candid and concise: an assignment taken at four days’ notice to replace an ailing colleague, of two concerts, stitched (to my ears) seamlessly together by Challenge Classics with no applause. He had not led the Ninth for some years and in his realisation I hear a circumstantial decisiveness, borne of remembered familiarity, that may be considered appropriate given the symphony’s own tantalisingly provisional status, completed but never finished as Mahler would have done if only determined to break his own established cycle of composition –performance – revision.

It’s a performance that resists the tendencies of discontinuity that others find throughout his music, not through the imposition of a seamless legato but with neat tempo relationships that sometimes belie the composer’s ever more heated verbal instructions. In place of a Ländler, ‘clumsy, heavy-footed, coarse’, is a jolly, up-tempo number, close cousin to the Scherzo of Schubert’s Ninth, forcing the quicker second theme into a taut danse macabre and thus making rare sense of the third, a World of Yesterday, of already only half-remembered quaint rural manners, seen as the senile exercise in nostalgia that it really can be through the movement’s increasing confusion between the themes and their tempi. Schønwandt and his players make a nice distinction between the types of ending towards the movement’s own conclusion, in the contrast of jutting or tapered phrases, that we used to call masculine or feminine.

This approach pulls back the symphony’s centre of parody from the ‘Rondo-Burleske’ and makes binding links between the first two movements of a kind that Mahler already tried in the Sixth, at least in the Scherzo – Andante plan. The Rondo’s double fugues work themselves out in busy, somewhat relentless ways of an inconsequentiality only magnified by Challenge’s close miking, which is otherwise a signal advantage, and so the Adagio’s pre-echo becomes the interlude of an interlude, before the real thing in D flat comes as a true surprise, transforming with understated tenderness the Tchaikovskian rhetoric Mahler had determined to adopt. There are many more fortissimo and sforzando markings in the score than you’d guess from listening to Schønwandt, whose long singing lines, gently swinging rhythm and sweetly modulated solo strings cultivate a lullaby for extinction that, as he remarks, ‘lifts us to a totally different spiritual level…where earthly pain is left behind us’. That’s not my idea of the symphony but it may be yours. Mahler is nothing if not equivocal.