Though the majors have downsized their recording programmes, the breakdown of the old structures of the classical music industry is having some unexpected results. When it comes to Mariss Jansons in Mahler, less actually means more. Jansons performed all but the impractical Eighth in concert with his old Oslo orchestra and selected live accounts have reached us courtesy of the Simax label. More recently we’ve had two live Sixths from him. And now he revisits the First with the orchestra which boasts the greatest Mahler tradition of them all.

Whatever the formidable competition, the present disc finds the Amsterdam team on superb form and if you warm to a comfortable, mainstream approach you need look no further. This is music-making which, technically speaking, suggests that the Berliners had better look to their laurels. Jansons has always brought off the finale with the instinctive panache characteristic of his best work. What’s missing elsewhere is a certain exaggerated relish, the sour edge to textual detail which may or may not be considered an essential part of the echt Mahler style. In the slow movement Jansons goes for a smoother, fuller, more consistent tone than I for one am happy with. Turn to Bernstein and you’re in another, more modern world, a conspicuously Jewish one as that maestro himself would have said.

Where many recent rivals offer Blumine as a bonus, the RCO label expects the main work to stand or fall on its own. Dodgy booklet-notes inform us that Jansons will be relinquishing his Pittsburgh post in 2004 (!) and the artwork is, as ever, inscrutably postmodern. The sound though is like the playing, both sophisticated and soft-focus. Enthusiastic applause is retained. Jansons devotees need not hesitate.