I would not have had Nézet-Séguin down as a natural Sibelian, and I would have been completely wrong. Too few recordings of the Fourth are made with experience of conducting Parsifal, the work that saturates every bar of the symphony, both its sonorous depths and its tentative forays into radiance. A Wagnerian melos imbues the conductor’s handling of Sibelius’s syntax throughout, and the piece emerges all the more strongly for it.

These are readings that get the bigger picture, capturing in turn the folksy village-violin character of the Third Symphony’s opening, the Classical elegance of the turn into the second subject (1'21"), and all the while a finely judged expressive ambivalence to their development, culminating in a gripping build-up to the recapitulation. Those points where Sibelius puts the argument on ice sound suspenseful rather than archly modernist, and the first movement’s grandiose coda feels well earned and not (set beside quizzical versions from Berglund onwards) like another commentary on symphonic form.

Depth of string tone is all the more welcome for being unfashionable in these works, without emulating the deep pile of Karajan’s Berliners or Maazel’s Viennese, and exhibiting a more stylish turn of portamento than either. The warm acoustic makes its own contribution to the songful lightness of being in the Third’s middle movement and the related, dark divisi cello-writing of the Fourth’s Largo. A relationship with the COE and DG has given us the conductor’s smoothly grooved takes on canon symphonists; this Montreal Sibelius operates on another, higher level, rewarding attentive ears and raising hopes for a further instalment.