For what it’s worth, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen can boast as strong a claim as any other modern ensemble to resemble in size and sonority the Meiningen Court Orchestra which gave many Brahms performances admired by the composer himself. And what is it worth? Only the Fourth was written to be premiered in Meiningen, whereas the Vienna Philharmonic gave more first performances of his orchestral works than anyone else.

Nonetheless, only if sheer density of string tone counts as a sine qua non will these performances disappoint. There’s certainly no lack of weight or impact to the First Symphony’s opening bars. RCA’s studio engineering fairly represents the sound of the orchestra from a mid-stalls perspective, with a little extra telling help given to the bassoons in support of a lean but strongly projected bass section.

Paavo Järvi’s direction, too, is unusually successful at recreating live and contingent drama in studio conditions. Divided violins play their part, notably in the struggles of the finales to Nos 1 and 3, but throughout the ensemble and indeed all three symphonies the quality of voice-leading raises them above most modern rivals, large or small. Everyone knows where they are going, and how to get there.

Järvi allows the pulse to relax without slackening tension during the most searching passages of development sections. His handling of rubato within comparatively swift basic tempos places him in the lineage of Toscanini and Boult back to Fritz Steinbach – perhaps Brahms’s most favoured conductor for his symphonies – and it’s complemented by the most natural handling of string portamento that suggests this much-abused expressive device is finally being understood from within rather than applied from without by modern orchestral string sections.

When Steinbach visited London in 1902 with his Meiningen men, one review reported that ‘the conductor seemed to be recreating rather than giving a rendering’ of the symphonies – and, worth noting, ‘with a spirit of romance’. It is this spirit that lends such unaffected but sincere charm to the First Symphony’s Andante sostenuto, and to the delicate pointing of the Haydn Variations. The Poco allegretto of the Third is another wistful delight, untroubled by laboured intimations of mortality, led as if by the solo winds, with the conductor leaning just a touch into the major/minor fluctuations of the Trio before stilling all his players for a moment of profound, late-Schubertian contemplation.

Indeed, Järvi’s account of this, the most notoriously tricky personality of the symphonic quartet, gets better and better as it goes on. Without imitating Gardiner’s headlong rush into the finale’s abyss, Järvi encourages his players to throw caution to the winds – though the end could be quieter: Brahms’s piano here (most beautifully balanced in the strings) is a much more rounded and contented creature than the same dynamic that opens the Fourth, now full of nervous tension.

Once past a forthright and comparatively straitlaced exposition – again, there are notable precedents for this approach from the conductors referenced above – this Fourth steadily builds in stature. Indeed, the most controversial point of the cycle as a whole may be the imposing rallentando to clinch the first movement, so different from the pell-mell accelerando favoured by Gardiner and others (but not, apparently, by Brahms himself).

One singular editorial choice is the pair of solo violas opening the recapitulation of the Fourth’s slow movement (at 5'28"), carrying here the flavour of Liebeslieder waltzes (there is a BMG Toscanini Collection album that makes precisely this point by shrewd juxtaposition). Gardiner got there before him, but Järvi conducts the softly drooping wind quavers as an accompaniment to the divisi viola melody rather than the other way around. Despite some noble individual contributions from flute, horn and trio of trombones, the finale never quite transcends its passacaglia framework of Baroque severity to reach the pitch of ineluctable destiny achieved by the First and Third. Taken in the round, however, I’d place Järvi’s cycle above its most comparable rivals in Mackerras (Telarc, 10/97), Berglund (Ondine, 8/01) and Ticciati (Linn, 4/18). Brahms for our time, certainly, but then Brahms is for all time.