It is several years since Vladimir Jurowski began working regularly with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and two since he became its principal conductor. The partnership is clearly working on many levels, and Jurowski has proved an enterprising programme-planner. Only now, however, has he started to address the big Mahler symphonies that constitute the bedrock of many conductors’ careers and which, 20 years ago, formed the LPO’s core repertoire under Klaus Tennstedt. There was ground to be made up on both sides and it was no surprise to find conductor and orchestra, in Friday’s season-opening performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony (“Resurrection”), testing each other and the music with a degree of caution.

Jurowski’s Mahler may need some getting used to. It is neither visceral nor earthy, has little room for extremes and represents the opposite of a blast-fest: one of this performance’s achievements was the way it underlined how much soft music there is in Mahler, an impression intensified by the chamber-musical sensitivity of the LPO strings and the antiphonal echo-effects in the offstage brass. Jurowski does not pull the music about or show the slightest sign of (self) indulgence: there was a seamlessness of tempo-choice in the opening and closing movements that knitted together the work’s often disjointed elements, making this futility-to-faith symphonic struggle more coherent than usual – but also, thanks to Jurowski’s Apollonian control, less cathartic. The tempo for the second movement Ländler was so deliberately spacious as to hold the music up for inspection; the underwhelming scherzo, by contrast, never lingered long enough to betray a whiff of schmaltz.

What was missing was spontaneity, a sense of inspiration-in-the-moment. The one touch of transcendence came at the start of Urlicht, which Christianne Stotijn sang with clairvoyant grace. The tightly disciplined London Philharmonic Choir contributed to a fragrant finale, and Adriana Kucerova was the sweet-voiced soprano. But Jurowski will have to embrace Mahler on a more emotional level, and give his orchestra greater freedom, if he is to probe the size and depth of feeling to which this music aspires – and which a great performance rapturously reveals. Rating: 3/5