The Australian World Orchestra is effectively a gathering of Aussie clans – a grand reunion of native musicians based both at home and abroad in celebration of their collective national identity. And by bringing in a real heavyweight – Zubin Mehta – for these Melbourne concerts from 2013, the sense of occasion in both performances is inescapable, whether you warm to their demonstrably grandiose manner or not.

The Rite of Spring throws its credentials down from the get-go with a bassoon solo so languorous in its awakening from winter slumbers that it’s as if the time-lapse flowering of the Introduction has been slowed down for optimum effect. It’s a lumbering beast of a performance, big and gnarly, weighty and deliberate, where even the up-tempo numbers don’t seem to conform to any definition of the word ‘dance’. The open acoustic does nothing to enhance tightness and immediacy, and details like the dragging of string basses in a deeply lugubrious ‘Spring Rounds’ carry a considerable bulk. Yes, it’s rough-hewn and atavistic, and often conveys a beastly excitement, but I miss uplift and impetuosity, and the headlong drive of ‘The Dance of the Earth’.

The Mahler is writ similarly large but, drawing upon Mehta’s Viennese credentials, it has an authenticity and echt turn of phrase that is never less than enticing. Mehta has an inbred feeling for the Ländler-infused score and exhibits an acute nose for atmosphere. The central section of the first movement with cello glissandos barely grazed in is quite magical up to and including the dark shadow which falls across the scene in tuba and bass drum – and there’s a wonderfully dark transition into the second upheaval of the finale. Climaxes are suitably explosive, great welters of sound, with the coda of the first and last movements marked by rollicking horn trills and sky-rocketing trumpets respectively. Again, like the Rite, it’s all very weighty and deliberate; but that seems to chime better with Mahler’s late Romanticism and the AWO undoubtedly give Mehta’s approach their wholehearted commitment.

Mehta elects to include the discarded ‘Blumine’ movement, connecting it to the fragrant nature-world of the surrounding movements and most especially (to my ear) the Trio of the rumbustious scherzo. But its sentimental C major is odd in the scheme of things and it also stands apart in one other respect: the preoccupation of the perfect fourth in the rest of the symphony.

But what is this fast growing trend to have all the string basses play the tricky ‘Frère Jacques’ opening solo of what is normally the third movement? It is so out of keeping with the spooky and grotesque ambience of the movement. Would Mahler have scored it thus – ie a bass not a cello – had a homogenised beauty been his preoccupation? I think not.