The orchestra that brought Mahler’s Sixth into the world might indeed claim some historical kinship with his music – but as with their performance of that symphony under their chief conductor Tomáš Netopil this account of the pantheistic Third doesn’t exactly move mountains. It has its moments – especially in the pastoral inner movements – but it isn’t momentous in the way that the piece can and needs to be, and when you put it alongside Bernstein’s classic New York Philharmonic account the reality of what it lacks looms very large.

It sounds splendid, though, eight unison horns tall, wide and handsome at the outset – one of the most arresting openings in all symphonic music. Then again is it craggy enough, does it feel elemental? Is it not too urbane, too literal, where this visionary first movement is concerned? The orchestration here is flabbergasting and needs to be dispatched with abandon. Summer’s emergent march must generate a certain degree of euphoria culminating in those massive swelling chords where the whole natural world seems to open up before us. The ‘rabble’ sequence of Charles Ivesian madness must do more than it says on the tin. The wildness is lacking. On the plus side the first trombone’s noble orations hit the spot, a hangdog gruffness about them, and Netopil really goes for the breakneck schnell in the closing pages albeit a couple of bars later than directed.

I much enjoyed Netopil’s second and third movements – deftly done – the ‘flora’ minuet full of charm in the fiddle and wind solos, the rumbustious ‘fauna’ movement making much of the evocative posthorn solos (László Kunkli) atmospherically distanced to achieve a real lontano effect. The pages before the coda are really exquisite.

In the haunting Nietzsche setting Bettina Ranch has the advantage of a lovely contralto colour and again the atmosphere is potent. But with regard to the contentious ‘slides’ of a rising third in the oboe and cor anglais solos I am still not convinced that Mahler intended his direction hinaufziehen (‘drawn upwards’) – like a sound of nature – to be taken literally. To me it’s a feeling, an impression, that he was after. If not he would surely have indicated a glissando such as he did for flute and oboe at one point in the ‘Rondo-Burleske’ of the Ninth. Many a great Mahlerian has chosen not to take it literally.

Like Bernstein, whose account of the great finale’s essay on the nature of love is second to none in his daringly expansive New York recording. Where Netopil conveys an affecting intimacy in the early part of the movement (though as the temperature rises the string counterpoint is prone to over-accenting), Bernstein is already going cosmic. In my view there isn’t another recorded account to touch it.