The headline act in this January 2016 Munich concert was the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as the eponymous hero of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. The real wonder, however, is the Dvořák. In an ideal world, these two Dvořák pieces would have been released on a single CD, though I’m bound to concede that there’s a certain pleasure to be had from watching this fabulous orchestra in action. (Is there currently a finer conductor-orchestra combination than this, in Germany or beyond?)

The Carnival overture, the rowdier younger brother of the Eighth Symphony’s own folk-festival finale, is a difficult piece to bring off if it’s a musical revel you seek as opposed to mere noise. Happily, there is nothing remotely noisy about this exceptionally classy performance. The Eighth Symphony is one of the loveliest – and in episode after episode one of the most purely affecting – in the repertory. This is a deeply treasurable account of it. It is also one that yields nothing in charm or authenticity of mood to performances under such Czech-born masters as Talich, Stupka and Kubelík. (I see that Stupka’s live 1959 recording with the Czech Philharmonic, a performance long known to Dvořák collectors, has recently been reissued by Praga.)

The Quixote, sadly, is a disappointment. Orchestrally it is highly explicit: at times, perhaps, too much so. But it is Ma who is the real problem, with his visually impassioned but often tonally exiguous and dramatically indeterminate playing. The ‘Vigil’ is movingly realised but elsewhere his performance falls some way short of such classic recorded accounts as Fournier’s (with Krauss, Karajan or Szell), Tortelier’s (with Beecham or Kempe) or Janigro’s (with Reiner). The Sancho Panza is the orchestra’s young Chinese-born principal viola Wen Xiao Zheng. He is very fine, as is the cellist Maximilian Hornung (a Quixote in waiting?), who joins Ma in one of his two nicely contrasted encores.

But it’s the Dvořák that’s the real draw here. The symphony’s rapturous reception – the genuine rapture of an audience bowled over and ablaze with joy – says it all.