In November 2016 Mahler’s manuscript score of the Resurrection sold for the highest sum ever paid for such a document. It had been owned by Gilbert Kaplan, New York businessman and amateur maestro, who himself recorded the symphony three times. Perhaps you must be over 60 to find those statistics surprising. Twelve months earlier Jean-Claude Casadesus and his Orchestre National de Lille chose the same work to celebrate their 40-year history together, an interpretation seen as well as heard on the ARTE channel. Having built his ensemble from unpromising beginnings in one of the more depressed regions of France, Casadesus is to step down at the end of the current season. Previous achievements include a Mahler series on the Forlane label, the first from any French orchestra. While you can forget the explosive unanimity of Georg Solti and his ilk in this repertoire, the French conductor tries to make the best of the band’s limitations, arguing plausibly enough in the (poorly translated) booklet-notes for light-textured Mahler. Should you be trying to place him in the context of his august artistic family, his mother is the veteran Gisèle Casadesus who played the elderly well-read woman bonding with Gérard Depardieu’s illiterate handyman in My Afternoons with Margueritte (La tête en friche). There’s something of the film’s delicate Gallic sensibility here too.

The avoidance of emotional overload might pay dividends for some listeners were it not that Casadesus has a tendency to move things along rather abruptly, undermining the sense of continuity. His mezzo, Hermine Haselböck, is a fine singer whose ‘Urlicht’ is more straightforwardly conceived than Janet Baker’s sublime effort for Leonard Bernstein, in keeping with the reading as a whole. Although there’s no special frisson, the line is secure, the vibrato focused, and those impressed by her piano-accompanied Mahler songs (Bridge, 2/12) may wish to explore further. Not that the sound is altogether state-of-the-art, the soloists, as so often, made artificially present. A bigger problem is the conductor himself, not just huffing and puffing but, presumably, jumping up and down. The noises caught by the microphones make this an unlikely candidate for repeated listening. Closing applause is retained.

If you’re after an audio-only Resurrection, Vladimir Jurowski in 2009 brings us closer to that special sense of universality and spiritual uplift which the music demands.