Mahler's 10th Symphony was mysteriously absent from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's anniversary retrospective in 2010-2011, an omission now effectively – if belatedly – rectified by this formidable, if at times flawed performance, conducted by Vasily Petrenko.

The work itself remains controversial. It was left unfinished at Mahler's death, though several posthumous performing editions have been prepared, of which Deryck Cooke's, used on this occasion, is the most familiar. Few would deny that it constitutes one of the most powerful and engrossing of all symphonic statements. Yet Mahler would doubtless have made revisions had he lived, and what we hear can only ever be an approximation of his intentions. Some established Mahlerians have refused to conduct it, contenting themselves solely with the opening adagio, the only section fully worked out before Mahler's death. Petrenko has memorably given us the adagio in the past. His gravitation to the complete work – first with the National Youth Orchestra, now with the RLPO – is to be welcomed.

As with much of his Mahler, his interpretation was hard-edged and fiercely unsentimental. The brutality that characterised his remarkable account of the 6th Symphony also informed his treatment of the 10th's two scherzos, adding aggression to their already unnerving sense of rhythmic and thematic dissolution – though the first of them could actually have done with a bit more restraint and shape.

On this occasion, he took the central Purgatorio slowly, which was perhaps less than ideal: it sounds more eerie and ambivalent when done faster. The outer movements, however, were tremendous. The adagio accumulated tension and weight, and its climactic eruption into dissonance was truly shocking. The finale, progressing from despair to hope and a sense of serenity unique in Mahler's output, was as superbly controlled as it was moving.

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