It’s Colin Davis’s rotten bad luck that his versions of Carl Nielsen’s Second and Third symphonies should appear only a few months after Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic released the same programme on Dacapo. Gilbert’s raw-boned, architecturally smart, assertively played performances of Nielsen’s Four Temperaments and Sinfonia espansiva is everything that Davis’s performances are not, but need to be. I happened to be at one of the live Barbican performances out of which LSO Live culled this CD and that night the LSO were on shocking form: internal meandering, flabby attack and untidy ensemble ruled. Perhaps the takes used on this disc came from other concerts in the series, as these problems are largely absent on CD; but the tone remains tentative and grimly determined – dogged professionalism allowed to wing it in interpretations that, every instinct says, needed far longer to mature.

Sinfonia espansiva is undermined terminally by Davis’s clipped, middle-ground tempi. Gilbert has Nielsen’s Allegretto skip spryly out of the bucolic dream of the Andante pastorale that preceded it; under Davis the same Allegretto maintains, rather than chemically alters, the mood. The finale is, ditto, oddly lacking in poetic incentive; the valedictory chorale sounds clubbable enough but the clue is in the title. Airborne expansiveness? Not here.

Comparable problems dog The Four Temperaments, while a sound picture that drags everything into a grey no-man’s-land proves ruinous to Nielsen’s internal counterpoint and, once again, leaves Gilbert and Dacapo with little to worry about.