A year or two ago I watched a fascinating Supraphon documentary about the great Czech conductor Václav Talich who, towards the end of a long, distinguished and often tragic career, pondered how, were he to live his professional life again, he’d get rid of what he termed (as I recall) ‘Romantic silt’. These spruce, chipper performances by the youthful Metamorphosen Berlin make me wonder whether on hearing them Talich might have been prompted to eat his words.

For the most part, here we’re talking the bland leading the bland, playing that’s polished, smoothly blended and skilfully dispatched. But charm? Nostalgia? The ochre warmth we associate with Suk and his father-in-law Dvořák? Not much, I’d say. Take the second movement of the Suk Serenade. Sure, the lightness of touch and cleanly illuminated inner voices have their own appeal; vibrato is very sparingly applied (in the expressive second set especially); but the heart-breaking chord that stems the flow at 2’42” wants for impact, though the quieter music that follows is beautifully performed. The slow movement has a winning purity about it; again the soft playing works best, but I can’t escape the feeling that the whole production is in urgent need of a blood transfusion. It’s all so anaemic.

Conductor/cellist Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt takes centre stage for Suk’s haunting ‘Love Song’ (in his own arrangement, very sensually played) and there’s a trio of short pieces by Victor Herbert, the last of which – ‘Ghazel’, a real charmer – is possibly the most distinctive track on the CD. The highlight of the group’s Dvořák String Serenade is its vivacious finale, the string-music equivalent of a Slavonic Dance. The rest just drifts by in a mood of elevated routine. Kubelík (ECO – DG; BRSO – Orfeo), Mackerras (EMI) and, in the Suk, Talich and the Czech PO (Supraphon, either pre- or post-war) remain unchallenged.