Listening to these polished performances, I marvel that the Kansas City Symphony was founded as recently as 1981. Kudos, then, to Michael Stern, who’s stepping down as music director after 19 seasons, for helping to make the KCS a worthwhile destination on the musical map. Indeed, given Reference Recording’s crystalline sound (courtesy of Keith O Johnson’s engineering wizardry), which leaves absolutely nowhere to hide, the orchestra’s account of Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet is most impressive. Perhaps the strings aren’t quite as voluptuous as in some rival versions – Dohnányi with the VPO (Decca, 3/97), say, or Rattle with the Berlin Phil (Warner, 10/11) – but they play with ardent unanimity all the same, and the other sections are equally fine.

Stern’s interpretation of the Piano Quartet is largely enjoyable, too, with well-judged tempos – although in the finale I sense he sacrifices excitement and élan for precision and clarity. I also have mixed feelings about Bright Sheng’s Black Swan, as its lushness counteracts the intimacy of the piano original from Op 118.

What a stroke of genius, however, to include Virgil Thomson’s orchestration of Brahms’s Eleven Chorale Preludes. Reference’s booklet note doesn’t give any backstory, but with a little online sleuthing I learned that it was commissioned by a New Orleans industrialist and premiered in March 1957 by that city’s orchestra under Thomson’s direction. Other conductors took it up, including Monteux, who performed it with the Boston SO in 1959. Much of Thomson’s scoring is Brahmsian in spirit. Try the first version of No 2, ‘Herzliebster Jesu’ (Stern and the KCS offer two different settings), with its rich horn-writing, say, or No 7, ‘O Gott, du frommer Gott’, whose sober delicacy glances back to the more introspective passages of the Fourth Symphony. Like Schoenberg, Thomson occasionally utilises percussion instruments Brahms never employed, like the chimes in No 4, ‘Herzlich tut mich erfreuen’, although this is subtly done. Here and there he’ll also emphasise some of the music’s rhythmic quirks (syncopations, hemiolas), and while I’m not sure this fits with the contemplative spirit of the original, it enlivens the listening experience nonetheless. Thomson’s arrangements alone make this spectacularly recorded album well worth hearing.