Not for the first time the music industry has had to adapt to new socio-economic realities and I half expected the present recording to offer Mahler’s score in the pocket-size edition by Erwin Stein. That reduction has received several airings in recent months. But no, this is the real thing, captured in socially distanced mode during last summer’s interlude between pandemic peaks. Previously toured in January 2020, the work was pressed into service again for the Bamberg orchestra’s triennial Mahler-focused conducting competition with the opportunity taken to record it in the acoustically privileged Joseph-Keilberth-Saal.

Familiar fare for these players, then, although they sound anything but jaded under the direction of principal conductor Jakub Hrůša. Where erstwhile chief Jonathan Nott tended to play up the music’s presentiments of modernism, his successor combines forensic scrutiny with a readier embrace of tenderness and geniality. One is conscious that this is a Central European orchestra with a distinctive Czech-German pedigree. Not that Hrůša smooths over the contradictions present in the notation at the outset. The first movement retains an element of out-of-doors indeterminacy, ready to take us along any one of several paths. Were the carefully inflected contributions of woodwind, horns and strings less completely delightful, the pacing might come across as eccentric. Unlike so many of his peers, the conductor is prepared both to challenge and to relax.

The second movement’s sinister fiddler is balanced more prominently than some will like. Then again, the Trio has a radiant transparency that lets every detail shine. In the ‘peaceful’ slow movement the scale, like the string section, is smaller than usual, yet with first and second violins seated antiphonally and the players spread out on a specially extended platform, the effect can still be magical. The throwing open of the gates of Paradise, always tough to pitch, is here less than apocalyptic, the overall approach lighter and more innocent than it is for Iván Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra. It is typical of Hrůša’s care for the finer points that the finale’s initial muted cello gestures sound more than ever like cattle gently lowing. Soloist Anna Lucia Richter, Mater gloriosa in Riccardo Chailly’s Lucerne Festival Mahler Eighth (Accentus, 9/17), is miked up a little but is seldom arch, and without the excessively operatic vibrato that led Leonard Bernstein (DG, 8/88) and Anton Nanut (Stradivari Classics) to substitute the voice of a boy treble.

Given the circumstances the sound engineering is a triumph, making a virtue of the obligatory separation between instruments without loss of bloom: the horns reach us as if from the depths of an enchanted forest. In the early 1950s the Record Guide of Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote of Mahler in terms of ‘a final precision in the expression of nostalgia for the low ceilings, the wavering nightlight, the fields and woods, the unambiguous affections, the stilled terrors and the sharp, fleeting raptures of childhood’. It’s all here! Taut, refreshing, often inspired, never bland. Such music-making confirms Hrůša as among the very finest Mahler conductors of the younger generation.