Tadaaki Otaka is a Rachmaninov interpreter of no mean experience and insight – I for one recall with pleasure his underrated series from the early 1990s for Nimbus with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Two decades on, he remains a highly sympathetic, sure-footed and observant guide through the mighty Second Symphony, and he secures a tidy and spirited response from his Melbourne forces. True, the strings are wanting in the last ounce of sumptuous tone and muscular fibre but the playing has both keen articulation and bracing rhythmic point in its favour; indeed, one of the performance’s chief pleasures is Otaka’s evident care in clarifying numerous contrapuntal felicities, even in the most densely scored tuttis. The Japanese maestro also shows real skill in stoking and sustaining tension, as well as giving meaningful shape to the composer’s long-breathed melodic lines. For some listeners Otaka’s will, I fancy, be too circumspect a reading but what it may lack in sheer impulsiveness and hot-blooded, Slavic fervour is more than compensated for by its unassuming sense of purpose and canny awareness of the bigger scheme; the exultant final statement of the work’s introductory material has a cumulative majesty about it that can hardly fail to stir the emotions.

So, an enjoyable and very decently engineered memento of some impressively accomplished music-making, but whether Otaka deserves to join the likes of Ashkenazy, Jansons, Pletnev, Fischer, Rozhdestvensky, Handley and Pavel Kogan (the latter an outrageous bargain on Alto) at the head of the DDD pack is another matter entirely. And I haven’t even mentioned a whole raft of analogue ‘golden oldies’ – Ormandy, Previn, Sanderling, Kletzki, Temirkanov, Weller, Svetlanov…