Mahler has always been central to Simon Rattle's repertory, though his approach to the music has caused controversy. Once described as "conducting with X-ray eyes", Rattle has cleared away many of the accretions of neurosis and prolixity that cling to Mahler's reputation, presenting us with a lean, dispassionate view of a composer primarily associated with existential angst. In certain symphonies, notably the Fifth, the dividends have been enormous. But when he turns, as in this instance, to the Eighth, you become more conscious of the drawbacks.

This is not to say that his conducting lacked insight. The symphony's remorseless structural logic - derived from cell-like fragments of material in a manner more associated with Brahms than Mahler - has rarely been more forcefully rammed home. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's playing and the choral singing, combining the CBS and London Symphony Choruses, were characterised by an in-your-face clarity that ensured every line of the complex polyphony was uncommonly audible. Only the octet of soloists could be described as mismatched.

What slipped in the process, however, was the all-important spiritual dimension. In this particular work, Rattle's forceful clarity sat uneasily with Mahler's mystic striving. The symphony's theological underpinnings - which equate the "creator spirit" of medieval philosophy with the self-sacrificing "eternal feminine" of Goethe's Faust - may now strike many as untenable, but we do need to be aware of the sense of a beatific vision, first desperately craved, then slowly emerging from darkness into light. If all is blindingly bright to begin with, the work's range is inevitably narrowed. Though much of this performance was indisputably thrilling, we were left with a sense that Mahler's spiritual journey remained worryingly incomplete.