Brahms laboured for the best part of two decades over his First Symphony and this is a disarmingly fluent account of it. The fluency is evident at the very outset in Jurowski’s brisk traversal of the introduction. Toscanini was similarly brisk. He, however, articulated with rather more rigour the complex weave of motifs Brahms introduced into what was in fact his final addition to the work. Jurowski offers an abundance of expressive shading yet there is little sense of an emergent argument, either here or in the triple-time Allegro which seems more balletic than symphonic. There is further agreeable playing in the two inner movements where tempi are similarly brisk, after which the finale’s advance is both suave and sure-footed. It is, however, more an endorsement of the musical argument than an exploration of it.

The Second Symphony, which followed the First with such uncharacteristic speed, is so wonderfully evolved from its own first principles that it can seem to play itself. Once again Jurowski offers us a free-flowing, finely nuanced account of the music, with clear-eyed winds, expressive brass and a string ensemble in which lambent-toned violas and cellos are properly to the fore. What the reading tends to smooth over are those intimations of menace with which even this major-key idyll is occasionally visited. I think of the trombones’ grinding canonic exchanges in the first movement development or the before-dawn chill which descends on the music in the lead towards the finale’s recapitulation, a passage over which Toscanini laboured long and hard during a pre-war rehearsal in which the BBC SO was more or less flayed alive.

Working in a more consensual age, Jurowski’s players acquit themselves nobly within the parameters of what is being asked of them and are rewarded with sound that borders on studio quality. I was disappointed by the submerged sound of the semi-dissonant horn solo – another moment of doubt and dissolution – which ushers in the coda of the Second Symphony’s first movement but that is perhaps as much an interpretative failing as a technical one.