Discreetly attentive to detail yet exalted in expression, a Festival Hall Pastoral from this team last January raised expectations that this Eroica does not quite meet. An explosive start bodes well. So do divided violins and the kind of narrow-bore brass sound that in recent years has reborn the London Philharmonic as the city’s premiere Beethoven orchestra. The second theme, however, is pushed and pulled about in the manner of an idea. A rustic slide in the Scherzo is another such.

Nothing wrong with ideas, of course, except when they draw attention to themselves as such. The symphony’s momentum in Jurowski’s hands is stifled by a recording that does not do his balancing of the orchestra justice: top-heavy in the strings, with more boom than attack to the timpani, it leaves solo winds struggling to cut through. In the same hall, live with the same orchestra (EMI, 11/94), Klaus Tennstedt’s vision of the symphony is altogether larger, more vivid, more violent too.

Jurowski bestows great nobility on the Funeral March, running seamlessly into the maggiore section and taking its climax in a single exhalation of despair. Elsewhere I was sorry to miss the spirit of recreative conviction that has fired his performances of Mahler’s orchestration of the Eroica; now that would have made a provocative coupling. Instead, a fiery but irrelevant Fidelio Overture is tacked on the end.