Nielsen’s Four Temperaments is a symphony of extremes, and so is Osmo Vänskä’s conducting of it, at least in the choleric opening movement, where at an overall 8'42" he is quite possibly the fastest on record, and in the melancholic slow movement, where at 13'01" I suspect he is the slowest. This is well and good in principle, and I’m all for pushing the envelope in this piece. But there is a price to pay. In the ‘Choleric Temperament’ something of Nielsen’s contrapuntal energy is lost, along with the violins’ ability to articulate clearly, while the ‘Melancholic’ has no ebb and flow. In between, the ‘Phlegmatic Temperament’ is too passive, and although the basic tempo for the ‘Sanguine’ finale is spot-on, its main reflective episode is exaggeratedly slow.

Nielsen’s character studies all have secondary elements within them – regret in the ‘Choleric’, wit in the ‘Phlegmatic’, hope in the ‘Melancholic’, common sense in the ‘Sanguine’ – and it is these that are short-changed in Vänskä’s account. Partly for this reason, Blomstedt still reigns supreme in this symphony, and among versions using the recent Critical Edition, as Vänskä does, the comparably dynamic Douglas Bostock and the more measured Michael Schønwandt both have the edge.

Much of the Fifth Symphony goes splendidly under Vänskä. In fact the entire second movement – massively testing for the strings, especially – is something of a triumph for the BBC Scottish players; only Bernstein’s New Yorkers trump their aces, delivering swagger on top of irresistible momentum. Vänskä’s first movement is finely paced to start with but could have done with a more flowing and flexible tempo for the Adagio second half. Splendidly barbaric side-drumming, though.I found it took a significant tweak on the volume control to get real presence into the recorded sound – in the Second Symphony the strings lack body, and in places in the Fifth it is the woodwind who sound under-nourished. At the higher volume-level, however, many tuttis emerge rather clogged, with a fierce blare on the brass.