The pleasure this disc affords rests in part in the programme it provides. Brahms’s Haydn Variations and youthful six-movement Serenade must rank high on any list of music’s most agreeable works. The opening of the Serenade, with its al fresco country mood and lyric second subject whose headily beautiful exfoliations Schubert or Dvorák would have been proud to pen, is a particular joy. A lesser composer might have been tempted to prune the piece and pass it off as a symphony but the 26-year-old Brahms knew that symphonies are made of sterner stuff. Less intermittently troubled than the Second Symphony, which it occasionally anticipates, the Serenade is the symphony’s deeply contented country cousin.

It is the perfect work for a young conductor to record. Robin Ticciati, who is roughly the same age as Brahms when he completed the Serenade, barely puts a foot wrong. The opening movement is realised with élan and expressive beauty, the movement with two minuets is deliciously pointed and sprung, and the Adagio non troppo is exactly that: expressive but not (as is sometimes the case) overindulged. I shall not be throwing out István Kertész’s superb LSO recording (Decca, 5/68 – nla) or Claudio Abbado’s more recent account with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. That said, Ticciati and his reliable and reliably recorded Bamberg players have nothing to fear from comparison with Kurt Masur’s lugubrious Leipzig version. I didn’t greatly care for Ticciati’s bullish way with the three Hungarian Dances; no performance can succeed if the playing itself loses balance and shape. Happily that is rarely the case with the performances of the Serenade or Variations, both of which give more or less unalloyed pleasure.