Mahler marks the opening Trauermarsch of his Fifth Symphony with the words “With measured pace, stern, like a funeral procession”. But there’s so much more to it than that. The character of the sound, for one thing: the way in which the reediness and plangency of the woodwinds impacts on that sound; and the accents which shape and define it. Ashkenazy gives us the measured pace all right but the character is so glossed over, the woodwinds so well blended into uniform greyness, and the accenting so incidental as to convey only anonymity. There’s a world of difference between weary and dreary. And even that sudden venting of outrage at the heart of the movement feels strangely noncommittal. Mahler was never that.

I do wish recordings would start acknowledging Mahler’s contention that the second movement is intrinsically the flipside of the first and that, if not attacca, its stormy invective should follow swiftly. But significant pause or not, the problem is again Ashkenazy’s lack of impulse, with the generous acoustic of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall further compromising the rhythmic snap of the music. The engineers go for the big picture over immediacy, while Ashkenazy slackens the surge of despondency to the point where it begins to sound like Strauss. It just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon and that tingling trumpet-topped premonition of the symphony’s blazingly affirmative close passes by with little or no sense of its importance.

The Sydney Symphony’s sumptuous first horn makes quite a showing in the big Scherzo but, in such a volatile movement, Ashkenazy seems always to be playing catch-up with the music, and those moments which spring so exultantly into overdrive are simply too deliberate to convey a sudden quickening of the senses. Ashkenazy is best in the various manifestations of the somewhat charmless Ländler – but even there he’s in danger of grinding to a halt. He actually does so midway through the Adagietto, rendering it so sticky and halting that this wistful love letter pretty much gets lost in the post. Nor does the airy transformation of its music in the finale achieve the uplift we might have hoped for. This makes three individual symphony releases in the Sydney cycle; hopefully there is better to come.