The opening page tells you what to expect – something clean, incisive and well articulated. But seismic, momentous? No, that isn’t Zinman’s way. This is precisely the kind of highly objective Mahler that clarifies the execution but diminishes the vision. Leonard Bernstein once said that Mahler took all the trappings of the great Austro-German tradition and pushed them to the nth degree. But Zinman pushes nothing. The tactical shocks that characterise Mahler’s tempo relationships are all but ironed out, the recklessness of the accelerandi, the rhetoric of the ritardandi, the general pauses that become chasms, the rubati, the portamenti – all sound dutiful at best.

There are reasons for all Mahler’s very precise and specific markings. Ignore or minimise them and you eviscerate the music. Where is the terror in the development of the first movement if the increasing momentum of that ride to the abyss doesn’t at least court danger? How do you convey the impression of a vanishing world, an air of gemütlichkeit, from the close-harmony trumpets in the trio of the third movement if the tempo doesn’t relax into a kind of nostalgic reverie? At the sounding of the finale’s Last Trump why would Mahler have inserted commas into the phrasing of his mighty brass proclamation if not to underline its expansiveness? Why does Zinman ignore them? Is the magic word “characterisation” even in his vocabulary?

Nothing here is writ large enough. Nothing feels momentous, new, unprecedented. The playing is fine, the engineering and stage management impressive – with the notable exception of the offstage band which is too distant and should anyway get closer. Anna Larsson sings with meaningful intensity and dynamic refinement in the “Urlicht”. But what does it amount to? If you want a fleet, airy, ascent heavenward, then this is for you. But don’t tell me it’s Mahler because it isn’t.