Friedrich Rückert wrote over 400 poems in the outpouring of grief that followed the death of two of his young children. Gustav Mahler's daughter, Maria, was not yet born when he set five of these poems in his song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). After she died he could not bear to conduct the work again.

This tragedy colours any interpretation as inevitably as the poignancy of the words themselves. In this performance with the orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, the sense of crippling emotional burden was clearly etched in the face, voice and body language of baritone soloist Jorma Hynninen.

What makes Mahler's settings so profoundly affecting is the intimacy and transcendent beauty of the passages, which suggest consolation in the contemplation of eternal life, as when the poet envisages the shining eyes of the young child becoming bright stars in an everlasting firmament and gains solace from that thought. Yet neither Hynninen nor conductor Alberto Hold-Garrido seemed able to encompass the music's serene, spiritual dimension; only in the dying bars of the final song, where the child is rocked gently in heaven's cradle, was there an acute tenderness.

Catalan by birth, Hold- Garrido is music director of Stockholm's Royal Opera House and gained his Sibelius spurs in Helsinki, first at the Academy and then at Finnish Opera. However, the Karelia Suite, which opened the concert, was pretty pedestrian and, after the interval, hopes rested on a stirring Second Symphony to lift the prevailing gloom. The WNO strings, albeit fewer in number than would have been ideal, produced a full-blooded sound. Their vigour was matched by the brass section, but the woodwind seemed constrained and, at times, ill-attuned. Hold-Garrido cut a figure of brisk efficiency but was somewhat detached, and he must take ultimate responsibility for the lack of a defining, unifying logic to propel the symphony to its conclusion.