David Zinman is an extremely competent conductor whose spick-and-span Arte Nova surveys of Beethoven and Richard Strauss inspire critical superlatives thanks in part perhaps to their astonishingly low cost. His handsomely packaged Mahler series is competing at something like full price. Sound quality is exceptional, yet its very faithfulness reveals an orchestra with less power in reserve than the great ensembles of Vienna and Berlin – or even Birmingham. In spite of much fine detailing, the team’s lucidity and directness can seem irrelevant in so gargantuan, proto-expressionist a score.

On the plus side, this reading will not spoil you for more characterful accounts and RCA’s sound engineering is far more consistent than that accorded the great names of the past. On the minus side I would count the refusal to milk passages like the third movement’s deliberately sentimental posthorn reverie. However pristine the shimmer of the strings, the effect is surely less poignant than it should be. In the Nietzsche setting, Birgit Remmert, no stranger to her part, is a little breathy as miked, while Zinman eschews the literal interpretation of Mahler’s Hinaufziehen (“pull up”) marking posited by Rattle, restraining the cry of the night-bird.

Distinctive, Swiss-sounding bells presage the Teutonic “Bimm Bamms” of the fifth movement. The quiet radiance of the Adagio finale is effectively achieved until, like so many contemporaries, Abbado apart, Zinman fails to nail its concluding bars. The string sonority is simply too puny, the brass over-stretched.

This version will please those for whom the maestro’s task – even in what Deryck Cooke described as “the most original and flabbergasting thing Mahler ever conceived” – is to secure an objective presentation of the notes rather than fashion a happening with the widest possible emotional range.