This Sibelius Fourth reminded me of the reaction to the symphony’s first performance in April 1911 from the critic Bis, for whom the bleak landscape held less foreboding than magnificence, all superb uninterrupted views and glistening plays of light. It’s not that Elder sugars the pill – though his strings don’t shy from vibrato or touches of portamento – more that the conscious gesturing replaces the line drawing of legend with a full-on painting. The brass snarls of the first movement are dramatic, but such scenic work can actually draw impact from the various echo effects that speak for themselves when not drawn out (ditto the ending, which in the score slips remarkably away in a mezzo-forte and surely doesn’t need preparing or underlining as it seems to be here). John Storgårds, with Manchester’s other symphony orchestra, gets closer to what you could argue is the cold heart of the piece and the one big gesture – the peak of the third movement – has more power for rising up from his flatter, more subtle terrain. Storgårds’s relative purity offers greater architectural clarity but his fifty shades of whiteness are actually more interesting than Elder’s more obvious colouring.

While I have some reservations about Elder’s interlocking of tempos in the Fourth (a more pronounced skip in the step of his finale would have been in keeping with what appears to have been the concept), his Sixth – like the charming Hallé Third issued back in 2009 (6/09) – flows with a wonderful inevitability, notwithstanding the tempo change at 8'39" in the first movement that threatens a return to gesture over line. Otherwise, this is a performance that combines weight with bounce, rhythmic sophistication with well-oiled movement and a cleanliness that revels in the bigger picture. As in that Third, Elder has an eye and ear on the bottom of his orchestra, aware that it’s the shape of the riverbed that controls the velocity of the water flowing over it. And in this symphony, mercifully, Elder lets the music disappear without announcement.