Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder has such an implacably dark heart that it’s possible to feel – even in a performance as fine as this one – that its fervently upbeat ending, hailing a new dawn after so much death and despair, is a mistake. But that would probably be another mistake. Gurrelieder thrives on contrasts and confrontations, most fundamentally in managing to combine an opulently late-Romantic, Mahler-celebrating extravaganza with an expressionistic declaration of war on the Wagner-Brahms tradition.

One consequence of this is that performances like those conducted by Pierre Boulez (Sony, 12/93 – nla), which aspire to coolness and detachment without downplaying the darkness, can be especially persuasive. This is not Mariss Jansons’s style; yet he achieves a no less persuasive effect through moulding and integration. The core of this superbly well-balanced reading is as passionately dramatic an account of the “Song of the Wood Dove” as you could hope to hear, with mezzo Mihoko Fujimura marvellously incisive and engaging. Alongside her, Stig Andersen and Deborah Voigt as the doomed lovers project the high-Romantic style to perfection, even if Voigt’s German diction has a few strange inflections. Then, as usual, Schoenberg’s curious idea of having the introduction to the final section declaimed in “speech-song” risks pushing the whole enterprise into expressionistic modernity, only to have its more basic Romantic roots reasserted by the life-affirming chorus.

A brilliant performance, then. But do we want to see as well as hear it? Brian Large’s vast experience with tele-filming concerts pays off in that viewers should never feel nudged into noticing things which might better pass them by. At the same time, we’re given vivid evidence of the large forces involved – four harps, four piccolos, two double bassoons, drums galore, chains to be rattled. The choruses of Munich and Leipzig are also out in force, rather staid in demeanour given their material but effective agents of the musical drama in Jansons’s supremely eloquent hands. We’re given a brief glimpse of Christian Thielemann and Anne-Sophie Mutter in the applauding audience at the end: it was one of those occasions, memorable enough musically, to merit preservation.