In this performance, magnificently delivered by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and captured in clear yet opulent sound, Bychkov’s attention to inner detail effectively enhances the work’s emotional intensity…Particularly illuminating is his approach to the much-maligned fugue which is shorn of its customary academic propriety, and instead manifests a kind of hell-for-leather drive akin to Berlioz.

There is, of course, the abiding warmth and humanity of the Czech Philharmonic where expressivity always trumps spectacle, where phrasing relates to sound in ear-catching ways and the reasons the notes are these in the first place rightfully take precedence over their cosmetic effect…Bychkov has his finger on the pulse of this music in a way I haven’t heard since the likes of Mravinsky…and Markevitch.

Bychkov kicked off his Tchaikovsky Project with the composer's most popular Symphony, but his advocacy for a work which is almost as much of an outsider as its Byronic subject is if anything even more impressive - he neither shortchanges nor oversells the piece's melodramatic qualities, and the balance between its light and dark elements is beautifully judged.

[Manfred] has rarely been played with such conviction on disc. The Czech orchestra are clearly inspired by Bychkov’s dramatic, almost Wagnerian conception of the piece. The Russian conductor clearly revels in the gloomy, doom-laden quality of the music.

The epic expansiveness of the Manfred Symphony suits Bychkov’s operatic tendencies perfectly. He clearly relishes the music’s moments of grandeur, over-the-top rhetoric and dramatic coups, and the Czech orchestra responds with playing of tremendous character

the combination of a seasoned operatic conductor with a headstrong, idiosyncratic orchestra prov[es] a lip-smacking combination....The Czech Philharmonic may not boast the lustrous sheen of some other central European orchestras, but instead the group plays with a very satisfying “crackle”.