The fact that composer, conductor, teacher and administrator Bruno Maderna was a leading figure in avant-garde musical circles in Italy and Germany might lead you to imagine that this is hair-shirt Mahler: the death-haunted Ninth Symphony as seen from some dodecaphonist’s bunker in Darmstadt. In fact, it is an emotional riot, extrovert and warm-hearted in a way which will have Mahlerians either reeling with joy or grinding their teeth in disbelief. No other conductor of the period would have dared such an approach.

It was William Glock who brought Maderna to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, mainly with 20th-century repertory in mind. The players clearly warmed to him, despite the fact he made them jump through some fairly alarming hoops. They play here with astonishing resilience, not mindlessly but with sensibility and élan. Perhaps it helps that it is not a performance that ever dawdles; it is always going somewhere, always on the move.

Such is Maderna’s exuberance in the first movement he more or less drains us dry of emotion in the first 12 minutes. Yet, despite this, he and the orchestra still have another 68 minutes’ worth of adrenalin in their tank. That the horns manage to stay the course, up to and including the rapturous outburst midway through the Adagio after the strings throw a bridge of fire across the abyss, is something of a miracle. I imagine several pints were sunk in pubs around Waterloo after the performance.

Needless to say, it is not a performance that leaves the audience drained, transported, and mute as Abbado’s or Karajan’s audiences invariably were. The promptness and warmth of the applause that greets the final dying from the light is of a piece with the whole – as unexpected (some would say, as untoward) as the performance itself.