Recorded live in Zurich’s Tonhalle in April 2010, this is David Zinman’s first such project during his 16-year tenure at the orchestra. Fearful that he would not get to record the Brahms symphonies, he was persuaded that the ‘somewhat creaky’ Tonhalle was viable for live recordings. In the event, there are no creaks or coughs. With clean, well-focused sound and applause happily edited out, this is close to a studio-quality production.

The Tonhalle Orchestra, a kind of Swiss Hallé, is an ensemble of proven pedigree that can be relied upon to deliver honest-to-goodness performances under most circumstances, something more than that on high days and holidays. Here conductor and orchestra rise to greatness in the Fourth Symphony. Elsewhere, they provide the kind of trenchant, well-grounded Brahms performances which have been common currency in Middle Europe since the composer’s own time.

As is often the case, the superbly fashioned Second and Fourth symphonies pose fewer interpretative problems than the more emotionally complex First and Third. The Tonhalle Third is all dogged good sense – too dogged in a stickily conducted Poco allegretto – with barely a glance at the music’s excursions into pathos and personal angst. The enunciation by the winds of the slow movement’s anticipation of an idea the finale will later broodingly explore is representative of a style of playing that doesn’t place great emphasis on finely shaded colours.

The First Symphony is given a similarly uncomplicated treatment. For once it really does sound like Beethoven’s Tenth. Zinman’s tempi are similar to those of former Nikisch pupil Sir Adrian Boult but Boult’s shaping of the drama was as dynamic as it was subtle: witness his 1976 Proms performance, recently released on ICA Classics (9/11), a performance that has to be heard to be believed.

Zinman is meticulous in his observation of Brahms’s dynamic markings. This makes for some interesting articulation but it can also dislocate the line and disrupt the pulse. Not that this is the primary cause of a somewhat stop-go account of the Second Symphony’s opening movement, where I find myself missing the subtly modulated forward motion of Zinman’s old mentor Pierre Monteux, who (astonishingly for those days) also took the movement’s long exposition repeat (Philips, 11/63 – nla).

What is curious is that in the Fourth Symphony, a work which boasts more hairpins than a gentlewoman’s boudoir, Zinman takes a less pedantic view of the markings. The music drives forward with no loss of weight and concentration, with the Tonhalle players displaying qualities of eloquence and imagination which earlier in the cycle are too often held in reserve.