When David Patrick Stearns reviewed the first release on the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s own label – Debussy and Strauss orchestral songs with Siobhan Stagg (7/24) – he rightly ticked them off for the album’s meagre 39-minute playing time. No such complaints this time round, with a generously proportioned programme running to 83 minutes, containing Dvořák’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies under the MSO’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor, Jaime Martín.

This is the first issue in a proposed Dvořák symphony cycle, recorded at the orchestra’s Hamer Hall home in 2023 during Martín’s second season at the helm. It comes distributed in association with LSO Live – whose own first recording in 1999 featured Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony with Colin Davis – and was recorded in concert (no applause) along the same model. The cover artwork is proudly set to feature iconic local scenes, here the limestone stacks off the shore of Port Campbell National Park known as the Twelve Apostles.

Many orchestras would just record the popular trilogy of the Seventh, Eighth and New World Ninth, but the Fifth and Sixth make an amiable pairing, composed at a time when Dvořák was embracing his Czech roots after an endorsement by Brahms had helped earn him a publishing contract with Simrock. Warner issued decent recordings of the two with Jiří Bělohlávek and the BBC SO (not part of a cycle), but I can’t think of another single-disc pairing.

Martín favours mostly fast tempos – not as swift or as bracing as Witold Rowicki with the LSO, but lively, perhaps more akin to the celebrated recordings with István Kertész. The Melbourne clarinets add a bosky flavour to the opening of the Fifth, which unfolds in bucolic spirits, while the Allegro scherzando third movement bowls along with that Dvořákian sense of the great outdoors. Martín allows the Andante con moto second movement breathing space (7'58"), opening with warm, expressive cellos, and there’s an unbuttoned exuberance to the finale, though not quite as thrusting as Rowicki.

The Sixth was composed when Hans Richter asked Dvořák for a new symphony to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic – a premiere that never happened because the orchestra did not want to fete the young Czech composer. Richter did conduct it in Britain – always fertile ground for Dvořák – at the Crystal Palace in 1888. It’s another amiable work and Martín conducts a charming performance. He omits the exposition repeat in the first movement (as does Bělohlávek) but at least this allows the MSO to keep the action from spilling to two discs.

The Adagio flows and the Furiant has a good sense of urgency, even impatience. The finale scurries along, although it could perhaps cut loose more, but this is an auspicious opener for Martín’s Dvořák cycle and a fine calling card for his Melbourne players.