For some years Dmitry Kitaenko has been revisiting his core repertoire, often in the company of the Gürzenich Orchestra, which he first guest-conducted in 1987. There is a sense in which time has stood still for this octogenarian maestro and some will applaud him for that. He has not abandoned his unfashionable tendency to dawdle, slowing tempos further in the manner of late-career Evgeny Svetlanov. Kitaenko prizes cleanly articulated sensuality above the antiseptic precision in vogue elsewhere. No surprise then that his Scriabin textures seem positively opaline when set against those favoured recently by Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic. The featured works are differently paired by their respective record companies, LAWO coupling The Poem of Ecstasy (or Symphony No 4) with The Divine Poem (Symphony No 3 – 12/15) and the Second Symphony with the Piano Concerto (12/17).

It is through his textual eccentricities that Kitaenko may lose younger listeners, quirks also present in the Scriabin cycle he recorded during his years as chief conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony (RCA, 12/95). If you enjoy hearing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 with a choir superimposed towards the end you may worry less than I did when wordless voices, sounding more like Hollywood extras than refugees from Scriabin’s Prometheus, turn up in the final 21 bars of The Poem of Ecstasy. This ‘effective expansion of the score into the completely grandiose’ (I quote from the booklet notes, where something may have been lost in translation) was devised by Yuri Ahronovitch, at the helm of the Cologne band between 1975 and 1986.

Another issue is the longstanding Soviet Russian fetish for unauthorised percussion. The climax of the Second Symphony is peppered with cymbal crashes which Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra (EMI, 11/90) manage perfectly well without. It is Petrenko who is the outlier in its lovely birdsong-framed Andante third movement, slower than everyone else. Those following Kitaenko’s Indian summer will find plenty to enjoy in his gentler melancholy, even if other interpreters put greater emphasis on Scriabin’s pockets of nascent radicalism. Oehms’s glowing sound locates both scores very naturally in the acoustic of the Cologne Philharmonie and, by extension, within the Romantic mainstream of a concert life that may or may not be returning any time soon.