“Big sounds, big rubatos, big everything.” That’s how Edward Seckerson summed up a previous, LPO Live reclamation of Klaus Tennstedt conducting Mahler. The qualities which impressed him in that Sixth (8/09) are also in evidence here in the First. That said, I can imagine younger readers wondering whether such a full-blooded approach to this revolutionary but still noticeably 19th-century score isn’t over-egging the pudding.

Some context may be helpful. By 1990 health problems meant that the maestro could no longer be relied upon to fulfil an engagement. Each concert, particularly those given with the orchestra of which he had been a loving music director during the 1980s, were gala events, acclaimed as personal triumphs while serving also to suggest that the line of great German Romantic conductors could somehow go on forever.

We know better now and it is tempting to imagine Tennstedt’s behind-closed-doors reaction to the obsessive orchestral precision of latter-day Mahler interpretation. With him one expected rough edges, lumpy tempo shifts, vivid (sometimes slightly unhinged) detailing, surging strings and spectacularly blaring brass – all pushing towards euphoric overdrive. For the duration of a Tennstedt performance it seemed as if truly spontaneous music-making were impossible without them.

Unhappy with his more cautious 1978 studio recording of the First, the conductor went on to authorise the heavier-handed Chicago remake nowadays available on DVD. The Royal Festival Hall account, a genuinely live taping featuring audible late arrivals and un-patched wind glitches, may have been something of a dry run for that. It lies interpretatively between the two although the finale’s second subject is already nuanced more subjectively than Bernstein allowed.

The bonus items are unexpected: a short interview touching on Tennstedt’s personal vision of Mahler as fellow-sufferer and, curiously, a performance of Glinka’s showpiece, slower and friendlier than usual, something of a non sequitur. The booklet contains a helpful contextualising note.