Schubert’s most famous ‘unfinished’ work, the Eighth Symphony, is unconventional in a number of ways, its B minor key and the opening movement’s 3/4 pulse not least of them. Mahler’s grand Lied is a match in strangeness – setting, as it does, a miscellany of ancient, wry Chinese poetry to music that is supremely European, for all its oriental reference, and absolutely of its time – its tonal shifts signalling ‘Twentieth Century’ in music’s equivalent of neon.

So it was an inspired piece of MSO programming to pair the Symphony and the great Lied. Schubert is never going to be mere curtain raiser, and in the MSO’s splendid rendering on Thursday night, the Unfinished was an achieved whole, its melodies seamless and sublime, its great chordal progressions disturbing and challenging – as Schubert always is. In its characteristic alternations of profound and playful, sonorous and lyrical, it prepared the audience for the work to come. But it also lingered, like an indelible context.