Regular readers will have their own pantheon of classic Mahler Ninths. My list is headed by Abbado and Bernstein. Yours may begin with Barbirolli. And we haven’t even arrived at C for Chailly, let alone C for Chung. The Korean conductor, currently embroiled in a bitter battle with the disaffected former manager of his orchestra, has been seeking to make the Seoul ensemble a regional supergroup on a par with Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra. This is their third release in what looks like becoming yet another Mahler cycle. Very good it is too, up to a point.

Myung-Whun Chung, whose repertoire sympathies are wider than his Messiaen-heavy discography might suggest, has his own way of pacing the argument. The first movement is not just broad but personally inflected in the Bernstein manner. Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra are balder as well as brisker at the start. The second movement is nicely pointed too but by now I was wondering how DG would manage to fit the rendition on to a single sound carrier. The answer comes with the ‘Rondo-Burleske’, its main material sounding like cartoon Hindemith at Chung’s breakneck tempo: the movement runs to 12'42" even though the visionary central episode is by no means fast. Whether or not you consider this a viable interpretative gambit, the experience won’t leave you indifferent. The finale is also free-flowing if less exaggeratedly so. String textures are confident, even comfy at the outset, perfectly controlled rather than angst-ridden or otherworldly towards the close.

The performance, captured live in fine sound over two nights (despite the dexterity of the playing there were plainly some fluffs which the sound team has attempted to edit), holds its own in a crowded market. The problem comes when you set the results against the timbral individuality and sheer class of Iván Fischer’s band. Ultimately there’s not quite enough sonic mahogany in the Seoul Philharmonic’s music-making, not yet anyhow.