During a long association with founding conductor Jean-Claude Casadesus, the Orchestre National de Lille tended to be associated with Gallic fare. Even Alexandre Bloch, music director from the start of the 2016-17 season, played safe repertoire-wise during the orchestra’s UK tour last January, its first for many years. Might pitching Mahler to an international audience prove a step too far?

The band appears to have developed a more intelligible take on the composer since immortalising its live Resurrection under Casadesus (Evidence, 2/17). Lille’s first recorded Seventh is as fresh and bass-light as could have been expected. But it is also racy, inelegant (where appropriate) and determined to do justice to the work’s expressive variety. True, the slightly pinched quality of wind and brass in the Adagio introduction presages some tendency to foreground strings and snatch at detail. That phrase-endings can recede into the melee may reflect an acoustic oddity of the Auditorium du Nouveau Siècle; the recorded sound as such seems well judged, neither too immediate nor overly resonant. The visceral engagement of the ensemble grows as the performance proceeds, more than justifying a place on the shortlist for Gramophone’s 2020 Orchestra of the Year.

The main body of the first movement displays abundant snap and crackle with no lack of languishing sentimentality at the approach of the second subject. The ‘Night Music’ movements are deft and fantastical, the second kept on the move without loss of charm. Leonard Bernstein, whose ardent 1966 New York template seems influential elsewhere, takes a much broader line. Bloch’s central Scherzo will surely turn heads as Bernstein’s once did, here exuberant as much as scary, the winds having long overcome any initial reticence.

Objectively speaking the quick-fire finale should probably sound less frisky, more Wagnerian. Still, it’s all great fun, the roller coaster ride never less than carefully characterised from first – the timpanist on energetic form – to last – a rowdy profusion of bells. Not flawless perhaps but hugely promising, sometimes thrilling and a long way from the forensic anonymity that too often passes muster in this repertoire.