There are long, noble stretches but the conflict zones of the first movement lack that last degree of urgency…the the magic happens: where some interpretations fall at the last hurdle, the great but sometimes hard-to-feel Adagio finale, this one hits peak form.

The Hallé perform with uncommon beauty and melancholy, but the music-making increasingly gets under one’s skin.

Elder has a cool, clear, carefully ordered take on the outer movements - Klimt rather than Schiele…the concluding pages of the finale, patiently unfolded and calm rather than death-haunted, would seem to have been listened to in rapt silence.

Elder eschews folksy sentiment in the Ländler rhythms of the second movement, and his lean string textures favour the woodwinds’ grotesque humour in the Rondo-Burleske. The final Adagio, conceived as if in one long dying breath, is spellbindingly beautiful and moving.

[The first movement] is very well stage-managed, its three huge, increasingly catastrophic climaxes lucidly navigated; perhaps in the end no single performance can encompass such a searchingly profound and intensely personal work.

It’s [the] sense of life ebbing away that Elder’s beautifully alert but emotionally circumspect performance captures so well...The Hallé’s playing is often magnificent. True, the strings don’t have that preening, velvety splendour that the Vienna Philharmonic, say, brings to this repertoire. Yet even this more wiry timbre sounds right in a work where the very sounds themselves seem to be inexorably decaying and melting into oblivion.