The engineered sound offers a realistic perspective from a seat at the back of the stalls in the Warsaw Philharmonic’s home, the Filharmonia Nadorowa. Turning up the volume will likely make your floor shake before the bass and winds snap into focus, and the percussion in the Piano Quartet’s finale has been placed at an all-too-discreet distance.

The orchestra nevertheless sound on their mettle, considerably less refined in the brass and upper strings than the Netherlands Philharmonic but attentive in response to their chief conductor, who directs fairly straight-faced accounts of outrageously skilful arrangements which have attracted flair-conductors such as Ozawa, Rozhdestvensky and Tilson Thomas. The inflated march at the centre of the Piano Quartet’s Andante booms and rattles away, though before finding a want of subtlety it is as well to bear in mind that Brahms scored the Academic Festival Overture for similarly outsize forces, and we know what satiric fun he had with that. Kaspszyk sharpens the expressionist blade of Schoenberg’s knife through the Intermezzo, but the finale takes too long to shake off a contented lethargy. The St Anne Prelude is similarly undone by a lumbering compromise between orchestral legato and smart dotted rhythms particular to the idiom (Hungarian or French, as it may be) in each case.

Still, criticism of finer details runs the risk of missing the point, when this oversize cardboard package has been designed as a marketing tool for the orchestra on its increasingly frequent foreign tours. Its members are pictured and diligently listed in a 24-page booklet, with biographies in Polish and English. Brahms and Schoenberg get a smaller booklet to themselves.