Following a two-year interregnum, the tenure of Andris Nelsons as the 21st Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchestra was officially inaugurated by this concert. Smiles all round, even while playing, suggest that the Leipzig players are at least happy to have a safe pair of hands in charge. Reports from Birmingham, Boston and London, where he has led dynamic and much-praised productions of Wagner and Strauss for the Royal Opera, indicate that orchestral musicians accord to Nelsons both a trust and respect not granted to many of his colleagues.

Head buried in the score, Nelsons nonetheless holds a firm grip on the relentless motor rhythms powering the event’s premiere, commissioned from Steffen Schleiermacher. The title of Relief suggests sculptural analogies, yet the work is made more of metal than wood or stone, hammered into place, and it may not be entirely mischievous to suggest that Schleiermacher was playing on the word’s double meaning with an all-too-brief solo for alto saxophone and coolly shimmering central nocturne introduced by the trumpet – a tribute, perhaps, to Nelsons’s own orchestral background.

Having already written several commissions for the Gewandhaus, Leipzig-based Schleiermacher (more familiar to record-buyers as a pianist with an MDG catalogue majoring in Cage and Satie) was a fairly conservative choice of composer, and there are signs elsewhere in the concert that Nelsons will seek to conserve rather than renew the heritage of an orchestra that takes its history seriously. His fellow Latvian and frequent stage-partner Baiba Skride was engaged for the Violin Concerto of Berg; conductor and soloist work harmoniously together in presenting it as a largely serene journey away from earthly troubles. Skride gives a requiescal sort of performance of unruffled poise, without an ugly note in it, lit from behind by telling but subdued orchestral detail. In admittedly unrepeatable circumstances, Isabelle Faust digs far deeper into the score – still partnered by Nelsons – at the memorial concert for Claudio Abbado, issued on film by Accentus.

There follows the kind of Scottish Symphony that the Gewandhaus could have given at any time in the past half-century – were it not for the fact that all of Nelsons’s recent predecessors as Kapellmeister have taken a more mobile, pulse-driven approach to music that admits only the subtlest handling of rubato. This is #ThrowbackThursday Mendelssohn. The main Allegro opens with a stagily impressive pianissimo at crotchet=75, way below the composer’s indicated mark of 100. Even Bernstein in New York wasn’t that slow – and at an identically broad tempo in the Adagio, Bernstein accesses realms of pathos that are foreign to Nelsons and his cultivation of an aristocratically reserved line. The Gewandhaus players often cover themselves in glory – especially a nobly sonorous brass section – and, if nothing else, show themselves adaptable to the changing winds of taste in music that they can doubtless play with their eyes shut.