‘In these concerts I couldn’t make enough slowings and accelerations,’ wrote Brahms to Joseph Joachim in 1886. He was reporting on how, during a tour with the Meiningen Orchestra, he had eased the Fourth Symphony out of the musical straitjacket into which Hans von Bülow had delivered it at the work’s premiere the previous October. How to obtain an expressive performance of new music was a problem which much preoccupied Brahms. Once a piece has settled into the players’ flesh and blood, he conceded, less extreme measures can be deployed.

Moderated expressive freedom is very much what Jurowski gives us in these powerfully wrought performances. The LPO has long been London’s finest Brahms orchestra and it is from within this tradition that Jurowski appears to have created his own sound palette, dark-hued but finely lit, with that precise ‘terracing’ of wind, brass and string sound without which no Brahms performance can hope fully to succeed. The Third Symphony’s mood of heroic melancholy is especially well served by these Rembrandt-like colours.

The expressive power Jurowski brings to both symphonies derives in large measure from the plasticity of his articulation of the musical line. Such plasticity might seem mannered were it not for the strong sense of forward momentum which informs his conducting here. Interestingly, the gaps between movements have been significantly shortened at various points on the CD. Brahms’s Third is not a symphony in one movement but it seems so here, to interesting effect.

The performance of the Fourth Symphony is cut from similar cloth, even if it is rather more obviously a concert manifestation of an already high-voltage reading. This is most evident in the third-movement Allegro giocoso, which Jurowski takes at an unusually fast tempo, somewhat to the orchestra’s discomfort. The effect is to turn Brahms’s epic symphonic jest – a finale in any other context and, indeed, the last movement to be written – into a febrile precursor of the passacaglia-finale with which the work’s tragic destiny is eventually sealed. The recorded sound in the (applause-free) Third Symphony is of studio quality. In the Fourth Symphony it is a touch more aggressive.