For all its popularity in recent times, Mahler's Symphony No 2 (Resurrection) cannot ever be entered into lightly.

We may assume Vladimir Jurowski, tackling this monumental masterpiece in a pair of performances with the LPO over the weekend, will have pondered deeply on his approach to it. The result, however - at least in the first performance - was meticulously calibrated yet drained of the apocalyptic drama that defines the work.

It began well enough with the sharp attack and taut rhythms of the opening pages, and continued satisfactorily with plausibly negotiated contrasts between the plangent C minor funeral march and the aspirational E major music heard alongside it. Yet when the mighty first movement eventually came to an end, one could be forgiven for thinking: "Is that it?"

If there was little sense of have been through an emotional wringer, expectations were further confounded with the Andante Moderato that followed. Here the lilting dance rhythms were flattened out by Jurowski's egregiously affected phrasing. Languorous to a fault, the movement lost its natural flow.

But was that perhaps the point? Was Jurowski actually conjuring up a never-never-land of nostalgic enchantment? Mahler did, after all, describe this movement as a "mournful memory of youth and lost innocence".

Heard this way, the interpretation began to make sense. The following Scherzo, too, inhabited an unreal world, of Mahler's Wunderhorn songs and of St Anthony's pointless sermon to the fishes. The futility of it all came across more powerfully than the "disgust" or the "witch's brew" that Mahler alluded to here.

The protracted pace of Jurowski's fourth movement allowed the mezzo soloist, Christianne Stotijn, to linger rapturously over Urlicht, while Adriana Kucerova was an equally fine soprano soloist.

In the finale, admirable contributions from members of the LPO's wind and brass sections stationed around the hall should have set the pulse racing. But Jurowski's deliberate, carefully plotted progress robbed the music of its sense of life-and-death drama.

A reading of sporadic inspiration, then, but ultimately one that sold the apocalyptic vision short.