Mid-career Mandeal worked with two noted Brucknerians, Karajan and Celibidache. Happily his Ninth is less bewilderingly long-drawn than Celibidache’s. His tempi at the beginning of the two outer movements are unusually broad yet he has the art of growing the music, of easing the pulse on after the initial exordium to the point where a broad, flexible yet forward-moving pulse has been established. There is thus nothing broken-backed about his handling of the first movement’s great double exposition as there is with some conductors.

The Hallé’s realisation of the reading is finely moulded, powerful where necessary, and distinguished above all by the sustained intensity of the playing in the music’s quietest passages. This is not “Hallé live” but a properly made studio recording. And it shows. The treacherous wind passages in the great concluding Adagio are all expertly managed, as is the awesome but awkward Scherzo, which Mandeal plays with a pace and élan comparable to that of Sigmund von Hausegger on his pioneering 1938 recording of Bruckner’s original score.

The recording, whose location is not revealed, is very fine. There is great clarity of detail yet enough atmosphere to convey the work’s numinous element – witness the almost unbelievably remote sound of the muted pianissimo horns in their spectral rejoinder to the oboe’s new subject six bars before fig J in the final phase of the first movement’s vast 11 minute exposition.