With a Mahler tradition stretching back to the days of Rafael Kubelík, it was probably inevitable that this great orchestra would want to document its oft-heard interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth under its current chief. Mariss Jansons was unwell last time such a recording was scheduled, in December 2011, when Bernard Haitink stepped in to direct the stoical (and in the finale surprisingly brisk) account immortalised on the same label. This one, captured live last year in Munich’s sometimes problematic Philharmonie im Gasteig, risks being seen as superfluous for all that its textures are warmer and gentler, closer to Dvořák than to Alban Berg. In fact I can’t think of a Ninth with less neurasthenic edge and a more inviting legato character. The playing, of predictable finesse, idiomatic or not, is preserved in grateful, slightly tubby sound. The concluding applause has been removed.

Jansons first set down the Ninth with the Oslo Philharmonic (Simax, 7/03) and his overall pacing remains broadly unaltered. That said, his approach now seems yet more remote from the edgy, hyperactive engagement favoured by Leonard Bernstein (DG, 5/92) or, closer to our own time, by Iván Fischer (Channel Classics, 6/15). Jansons has always been an essentially objective interpreter of Mahler and whether you find him sufficiently involved will be a matter of taste. That John Barbirolli (EMI, 9/64) was well aware of the problem from the other side of the fence is confirmed by the Bertrand Russell quotation found among his papers after his death: ‘Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.’ For me, that passion is rather too strictly delimited in Jansons’s first movement, its internal contrasts and direction of travel insufficiently dramatised. Berg heard this sometimes tortured music as expressing ‘a tremendous love for this earth, and the longing to live on it peacefully’ – an ultimately paradisiacal view that Jansons clearly endorses. Things turn less bland thereafter and, while the temperate finale doesn’t stare into oblivion and probably won’t move you to tears, its restrained expressivity and cultured sound provide easeful balm for difficult times.