Justin Brown has talked of learning this symphony as a child from Horenstein’s 1953 recording, and there’s a loving, expansive, Romantically saturated and somewhat blurry rhetoric common to them both. Consciously or not, they articulate a performance against Adorno, so to speak, insofar as the heterogeneous elements of the first movement are calmly and confidently bound together by the ‘leb-wohl’ falling tone interval. The harp ostinato that stalks the opening of the development section, especially in Abbado’s later recording, takes a gently accompanying role here, so that the eventual reprise of the first theme loses some element of surprise or relief.

What made Horenstein’s recording, for all the scrappy playing, ‘a magisterial and intensely emotional interpretation of the old-school type’ (David Cairns, reviewing the ‘electronic stereo’ reissue in 1971) is that he had the measure of the entire movement in one whole, Schubertian, deeply unfashionable span. In a precipitate rush towards the movement’s apotheosis, Brown loses that thread, and the accompanied duet for horn and flute in its wake is loud and a little careless: a rare blemish on the part of a finely drilled yet exuberant horn section whose experience playing The Ring with Brown stands them in good stead for the song-paragraphs of the final Adagio. The rest of the orchestra is on a less distinguished level – the trumpets sometimes curdle the harmony and the timpani don’t make the impact they might, especially in a headlong ‘Rondo-Burleske’, though they fit with the rounded etched edges of the interpretation. Of recent interpretations, Nott in Bamberg and Gilbert in Stockholm are both better played and more in tune with the temper of our time.