Vladimir Fedoseyev is one of the elder statesmen of the Russian musical scene, so it comes as no surprise that his Brahms conducting is romantic and old-world. This is also very Russian Brahms, recognisable both from the timbre of the solo instruments and from an undertow of melancholy in the readings. The two middle symphonies, recorded on the same evening in February last year, chime most readily with this mood: the idyllic Second, and the Third which Fedoseyev treats as a Chekhovian essay in the melancholy of remembered time.

Fedoseyev’s strategically fine account of the Second Symphony mingles lyric breadth with a buoyancy and zest that are sometimes in short supply elsewhere in the cycle. The performance of the First Symphony, more impassioned than refined, tends to thicken and congeal whenever the tension and the decibels are running high. It is the same in the finale of the Third where Fedoseyev and his players are content to trudge on in the face of the headwind of Brahms’s passion, confident of the quietus to come. The inability of the orchestra to refine its sound sufficiently to give it mobility in the tutti passages clearly presents a problem to Fedoseyev, not least in the finales of the First and Fourth symphonies were he resorts to some rather crude adjustments of tempo.

The saxophone-like Russian horns will annoy many collectors, in the first two symphonies in particular. The Tchaikovsky SO’s wind section also seems poorly constituted. A distinctive first oboe sits alongside clarinets that provide background blend but which have no real voice of their own. Nowadays live recording covers a multitude of sins; under studio conditions an orchestra as awkwardly set up as this would be too risky to record.

As to the actual recordings, there is a good deal of grunting and hissing from Fedoseyev as he does battle with the orchestra in the First Symphony. End-of-performance applause is retained but the gaps between movements are sanitised into silence. This is not a wise policy since it highlights the audience’s restlessness in the opening bars of a number of the movements.