What constitutes authentic Mahler?

I wouldn't like to define it but I know it when I hear it.

And I didn't hear it last night when Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the Philharmonia in a cool, clinical account of the Third Symphony.

This is the composer's hymn to nature, invoking the great god Pan, the meadow flowers, the forest creatures and ending with what is surely Mahler's Good Friday Music, in which humanity is redeemed by nature.

Under Salonen, the poignancy of the appoggiaturas failed to register, the lyrical phrases never throbbed with passion, and the tone was relentlessly spotlit.

Has Salonen spent too long in the glaring Californian sun?

Or was this the downside of the gleaming new Festival Hall, whose acoustics have already shown a tendency towards brightness and clarity rather than warmth and mellowness?

Certainly conductor and acoustics seemed made for each other.

Michelle DeYoung's mezzo had an authentically Nietzschean ripeness and the highly professional Ladies of the Philharmonia Voices and equally accomplished Choristers of Westminster Abbey and St John's College, Cambridge, added their angelic commentary.

Outstanding orchestral playing, too, both on and off stage, with Alastair Mackie's "posthorn" solo deserving a special mention.

There are steep increases in ticket prices, incidentally, plus the iniquitous booking charge, but at least punters got good measure yesterday with a substantial curtain-raiser in the shape of Oliver Knussen's hugely imaginative Violin Concerto, given an assured reading by Christian Tetzlaff.