Given the ubiquity of recorded Mahler, I can’t see these live relays making much impact. Which is not to say that they are without merit. Sonically speaking, Farao Classics’ hybrid SACDs win hands down. Indeed, this sound is more natural than is often achieved in the studio. If woodwind lines are occasionally obscured or the offstage posthorn solo fails to blend convincingly from its far-flung location, this is much as it must have been in the hall on the final leg of a successful tour. Claudio Abbado’s live BPO version might offer superior music-making, every textural strand bursting with life, but the sound of a gerrymandered Royal Festival Hall is less alluring.

On this evidence, Zubin Mehta’s stint with the Bavarian State Opera has transformed its house orchestra. Gone is the edginess displayed even under conductors like Carlos Kleiber; in its place a cushioned smoothness and affability. How appropriate this is in Mahler I’m not sure, yet the Third, an uncommonly optimistic work, is one Mehta knows better than most; this is his third official recording. Hence the sprawling first movement hangs together well even if the avuncular approach may surprise those used to Sir Simon Rattle’s insistent exhumations of detail. Under Mehta there’s a risk that the discourse will seem to matter less for all the finish of the playing. The soloist in the fourth movement Nietzsche setting ‘O Mensch!’ is the Slovene veteran Marjana Lipovsek, Semyon Bychkov’s choice (Avie, A/03). Characterising less blandly than her Bavarian partners, with a warm vibrancy in the middle part of her voice, she is less reliable on top. Mehta follows Salonen (Sony, 7/98) and Litton (Delos, 6/00) in rejecting Rattle’s famously rigorous interpretation of Mahler’s Hinaufziehen (‘Pull up’) marking; there’s no hint of upward glissando in the bird cries on oboe and cor anglais.

The rapt opening of the finale, beautiful in its way, is not so much poignant and intense, more a warm bath at the end of a long day. The playing is first-rate even if the trumpets are not absolutely in tune on the symphony’s final page. There is no stunned silence at the close. Viennese audience members offer warm and immediate applause to a maestro they have long admired. A word on the packaging: the booklet, notably well illustrated, should make a wonderful souvenir for attendees. There are two discs with no awkward partitions to fall out of the jewel case, although the break between them is wrongly placed. Mahler’s texts are given without English translation.

While Mehta might not offer a life-changing experience, his reading is characteristically easy on the ear. Not something one could say about Vladimir Fedoseyev’s Mahler. This will be a difficult sell. Mahler concerts from Putin’s Russia do not have the historic interest of the old Kyrill Kondrashin LPs which laid the groundwork for the composer’s rehabilitation in the Soviet Union. Unlike Evgeni Svetlanov, who recorded his Mahler series too late, Fedoseyev favours generally pressed tempi, riding roughshod over detail to achieve a certain brutish intensity. Aficionados of the remarkable, firm-voiced mezzo Dagmar Pecková may wish to explore her contribution to Fedoseyev’s Resurrection, another rendition in which you can forget neurasthenic beauty of sound. The inner movements are given their space but the precipitate jauntiness of the opening funeral march must be heard to be believed – Mahler meets Ruslan and Lyudmila!