"Vienna," the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus once wrote, "is an isolation cell in which one is permitted to scream." He was describing the Austrian capital at the turn of the 20th century, when the forces of modernism and psychoanalysis were prising open the cracks in its surface. This was the city on to which Freud's patient Mahler projected his own neuroses - above all in his Fifth Symphony, which can be construed as both a chronicle of imperial decline and an expression of his own disturbed psychology.

So it was presented by Russian Vladimir Fedoseyev, who gave a deeply disquieting performance of the work with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the overall effect of which was a bit like being locked in someone else's breakdown. The sense of decay and misery, which pervades the opening funeral march, was omnipresent. The instrumental solos of the second movement shrieked with nihilistic mockery, while the Scherzo was a leaden dance of increasing brutality. Unlike many conductors, Fedoseyev refused to relax the tension in the Adagietto, taking it so slowly that its lingering harmonic suspensions became excruciating. The finale was all arid triumph and self-deluding bravado rather than genuine optimism.

This was, without question, a major interpretation, radical and forceful in its impact. The flaws - and they were serious - lay in the playing. Though the VSO performed with commitment and intensity, the orchestra lacked technical finesse. The abrasive sound suited Fedoseyev's approach, but there were too many slips for comfort. The brass, by turns raucous and tentative, fluffed notes left, right and centre; the string ensemble was often slipshod, all of which is a great shame.

Fedoseyev prefaced the Mahler with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. The orchestral playing here was steadier, though Fedoseyev favoured large forces, expanding the concerto almost to operatic proportions. The soloist was Michael Collins, coolly poetic in the Adagio and ebullient elsewhere, though throughout lacking a final degree of refinement and subtlety.