The Eighth Symphony so often brings out the best in conductors whose Mahler is found wanting elsewhere in the cycle. I think of Solti (still thrilling after all these years) and Boulez, both so engaged for different reasons – Solti by the operatic loftiness of the piece, Boulez by its textural translucence. There’s no question that the Eighth breathes a clearer, more rarefied air – especially in Part 2 where it enters the realms of true spiritual enlightenment – and I had expected Zinman, whose pristine and undeniably well-honed Mahler has on the whole left me feeling short-changed, to shine here. He does, and he doesn’t.

Part 1 never quite transcends the letter of the score. You sense it in the opening measures – the mightiest upbeat in music. Those three words “Veni, creator spiritus” instantly establish a vaulting exhortation; there must be impulse, urgency in them, a very real sense of an unstoppable symphonic allegro in the making. You get that with Rattle, with Tilson Thomas, too. Zinman is too deliberate to convey much more than the scale of the event. It sounds tall, wide and handsome in that wonderfully open Zinman way, and in the central development he and his engineers ensure that we hear right into the texture, our ears led on by every strand of counterpoint.

The boys of the children’s choirs are too “Viennese” for my taste and fail to cut through with most of their exultant descanting. The exception is that crucial solo at “Gloria sit Patri Domino” where the engineers helpfully pull focus. The final pages are almost as headlong as with Rattle, those waves of choral entries going off like comets. But what’s lacking throughout this opening movement is elemental heft – the sheer force of belief.

Part 2 brings out the best in Zinman and predictably he’s happier inhabiting the intoxicating air of the upper atmosphere (where his angels are a little too well behaved) than the rocky lower depths, whose wild violin figurations and juddering string basses need a Solti or a Bernstein (would that his LSO account had been better recorded) to dig deeper. But then again Zinman doesn’t “wring” the opening Poco adagio as those conductors do and I find his response refreshingly honest and heartfelt. Later, when the “Mater Gloriosa” floats into view, the purplest music in the score (violins supported by harps and harmonium) is rendered serenely pure – all the portamentos in place but not so much as a whiff of the cheesiness that can cheapen it.

The last 20 minutes are very lovely, thanks in part to the exquisite Juliane Banse (“Una Poenitentium”) whose final solo, as radiant as I have heard it, so movingly reminds us that human love can trump all. Could the entry of the chorus into the “Chorus mysticus” have been even quieter? Perhaps. But the two sopranos soar blissfully into the momentous peroration, the offstage trumpets stretching the “Veni, creator spiritus” motif’s interval of a seventh beyond the octave to eternity.