Janowski plays them instead for creamy tonal beauty and perfection of balance, for refined textures and limpid transparency, where instruments subtly peek in and out of the texture, and where everyone is dancing. Nothing ever blares, not even the trumpets. The WDR musicians play with first-rate concentration and lovely sonority.

In a crowded field this must be among the most literal-minded readings on record – a compliment, so far as I’m concerned, to the musicians of the Cologne orchestra and their ability to play what’s in front of them without a ghost of what Mahler meant when he dismissed tradition as laziness.

An exceptional disc: I don’t think I’ve heard a more powerful, inexorable Fifth. It renews the work. The woodwind is wonderfully vivid (beautiful playing by the important first bassoon). The Pastoral is hardly less fine.