Sentiment against the young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel often turns ugly, with his most fierce critics lapsing into a disreputable strain of essentialism: that he is somehow an outsider and parvenu, and thus incapable of making music at the level of a Karajan or Kleiber. Both those names were invoked by commenters on web pages discussing his appearance as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic for the 2017 New Year’s Day Concert. How dare he presume to take the baton for this most cherished annual tradition?

Dudamel, 35, is now the youngest conductor to lead the holiday concert, which began in 1941. Along with the usual staples, The Blue Danube and the Radetzky March, Dudamel brought eight works new to the event, including Suppé’s Pique Dame Overture. When American public television broadcast the concert (complete with young dancers waltzing in elegant palaces and footage of the Lipizzaner Stallions), the Suppé overture was the first piece on the programme; the Sony recording places it seventh. That’s unfortunate, because not only is it a surprisingly substantial and delightful piece, but its performance best encapsulates Dudamel’s approach to the music.

More than anything else, one senses a slightly buttoned-up, almost reverential respect for these scores, and a delight in the purely orchestral qualities of the music. The Pique Dame Overture is at first atmospheric and suggestive, before it shows its true dancehall colours. In this, and in the beloved Blue Danube, Dudamel is strongest in the scene-setting and colouristic details. The waltzes and polkas burble along nicely but mostly under their own steam, with some of them, including Johann Strauss II’s There’s only one Imperial City…, becoming, if not quite mechanical, perhaps a bit bland. But when the music evokes the countryside, or birdcall, or winter landscapes, then Dudamel digs in and finds delicious colours and subtleties.

At the end of Josef Strauss’s The Girl from Nasswald, Dudamel also blows a bird whistle. One wouldn’t know that, simply listening to the recording, or indeed the more important fact that he conducts this music from memory. The visuals suggest that Dudamel enjoyed himself, and that the orchestra members were engaged and happy to be working under him. They also confirm what the ear eventually concludes: that he is both genial and dutiful, and if this isn’t the most rollicking or wry view of the Strauss clan and their contemporaries, it is never less than entertaining and exquisitely polished.