It’s hardly surprising that an Austrian conductor who earlier on in his professional life played in both the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera orchestras should perform Viennese light music with a degree of authentic feeling that recalls such past masters as Willi Boskovsky and Clemens Krauss, the latter more so perhaps because Manfred Honeck’s sense of style marks him out as one of the most remarkable conductors treading the current circuit. This is his second CD on the Wiener Symphoniker label; the first (10/14), also live, was a programme devoted to works by Eduard, Josef and Johann Strauss.

Here the same mastery of rhythm and phrasing applies, the way Honeck injects a lilt into the central waltzing theme of Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture, for example, and the combination of tenderness and exuberance in a 14-minute sequence from Richard Strauss’s sweet-centred ‘merry ballet in two acts’ about greedily gorging children Schlagobers (‘Whipped Cream’). As to Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Hereinspaziert! waltz, Gustavo Dudamel also programmed the piece as part of his 2017 debut Vienna New Year’s Concert (reviewed last month); both performances are excellent, the Vienna Philharmonic, as recorded, marginally richer in tone than Honeck’s Vienna Symphony, yet with Honeck there are those tiny, giveaway expressive inflections that suggest vintage branding, the sort of playing that has you smiling in appreciation.

I was surprised to hear the ‘Merry Gathering of Country Folk’ from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony turn up out of context, albeit in a lightly accented account, with added trills among the woodwinds for the swift, rustic middle section. Fingers crossed for a complete performance from the same source: given the evidence of what we have here, it would be a Pastoral to reckon with. Applause is limited to the very end of the concert, tailing Eduard Strauss’s lively Wien über alles. Superb on all counts.