The eight unison horns at the outset at once suggest a human drama – man and nature in one accord – and not some untold cosmic event. For those of us accustomed to what I would call full-fat or supersized Mahler, ever more virtuosic, ever more amplified, Bychkov’s reading and the Czech Philharmonic’s playing will sound decidedly homespun, smaller in scale than has become the norm. Which is not so say that Bychkov doesn’t have a self-evident grasp of the superstructure but rather that the more outlandish aspects of the piece – the most exaggerated gestures, the wildest flights of fancy – are not writ as large as is more often than not the case. The biggest gestures in this flabbergasting first movement – like the great vistas that open up out of the march music and the Charles Ivesian ‘Rabble’ at the climax of the development – are not as sheerly spectacular as we now expect to hear them.

But what Bychkov’s account lacks in heft it more than makes up for in poetry. The passage following the solo trombone’s final oration in the first movement (Jan Perný) is as reflective and beautiful as I’ve ever heard it. Bychkov really takes his time over pages like this that look inwards. Conversely the schnell direction for the home straight is excitingly observed.

The pastoral elements of the piece – the flora and fauna of the second and third movements – are kindred spirits to Bychkov and his orchestra. The charm and grace of the ‘floral’ minuet is possessed of an intimacy and warmth that says so much about the character of this orchestra. I love that the posthorn ‘serenade’ of the third movement (Walter Hofbauer) really sings (not too slow), a troubadour to the animals magically caught, as it were, on the wind.

I am also delighted that Bychkov’s oboe and cor anglais steer clear of full-blown glissandos for their bird cries in the Nietzsche setting. It would indeed have been a shame if Catriona Morison’s lovely work had to compete with the distinctly unlovely squawk of an actual glissando as opposed the ‘sense’ of one. Mahler’s direction ‘drawn upwards’ is surely impressionistic. He knew how to write a glissando if he wanted one (and did in the Ninth Symphony).

The great finale – Mahler’s most heartfelt adagio – is full of love and reverence. The string-playing glows from within and there is – as there should be – a very real sense of simple sentiments going cosmic. That piccolo solo which ushers in the brass chorale at the portal to the coda is to me a tiny human voice in supplication to the magnitude of the natural world.

But then again there is no performance of this last movement quite like Bernstein’s famous first account with the New York Philharmonic. When I reach for a recording that’s the one I return to – again and again.