Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Jansons, Edinburgh

For much of the post-war era the Edinburgh International Festival attracted the world’s finest musicians and the Proms made do with home-grown talent. By the turn of the century it was the Proms that paraded the world’s elite, while Edinburgh trailed with second-tier ensembles. This year things have evened out. Of the top-ranking orchestras, London gets the Berlin Philharmonic but Edinburgh has had Cleveland and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw – neither of which stopped en route at the Proms.

As the only leading symphony orchestra to have imbibed Mahler’s music under the composer’s baton, the Royal Concertgebouw has more right than most to pole position in the double Mahler anniversary now under way. That does not guarantee a memorable performance every time. But under music director Mariss Jansons, its fluent reading of the Third Symphony on Tuesday had many notable qualities, not least a moderate decibel level. There was no spotlighting for incidental effect: the first movement’s jubilant woodwind trills were among numerous details heard in perfect balance with the surrounding tumult. Jansons’ grasp of scale – forging a classical shape out of disparate elements, instead of lurching from climax to climax – was a welcome contrast to the thrill-a-minute school of Mahler interpretation.

Yet this was far from the complete Mahler performance. The horn section was out of sorts, creating insecurity at crucial moments. Perhaps we have been spoilt by Jansons’ work with other orchestras, but the Amsterdamers’ soft colouring masked the music’s muscular weight in the outer movements, throwing the focus on to the lyricism of the Alpine scherzo and the midnight hymn music, where Anna Larsson and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus radiated calm.

Elsewhere the performance communicated little sense of tension, leaving insufficient room for catharsis. I know of no orchestra that plays the violin motifs of the second movement or the threnodies of the closing adagio as eloquently as this. But by the very size of its ambition Mahler’s Third Symphony deserves to be overwhelming, and this time it was not. (