Dima Slobodeniouk has his Galician orchestra at the tip of his baton in the crisp sforzandos that punctuate the first movement of the Symphony in Three Movements. The prominence of winds and piano over a comparatively recessed bass line accentuates the symphony’s neoclassical heritage. In complementary fashion, so does the kind of alert but deadpan direction that distinguishes his version from celebrated, more extrovert rivals led by Rattle (Warner, 5/88) and Salonen (Sony, 11/90).

The contrapuntal tracery of the slow movement draws out more individually inflected phrasing, before the return of the war music – as Stravinsky originally conceived it – in the finale brings a kind of tight-leashed impersonality of action and gesture that would likely have won the composer’s approval. There is, in any case, more obviously demarcated space for ‘interpretation’ in the Symphony in C, where the Galician oboist enjoys his slow movement solo and the first horn bounces personably on the trio rhythms of the Allegretto.

One object example of such an interpretative space is the steady build-up of tension through the two-minute slow introduction to the finale. Here again, though, Slobodeniouk moulds the brass chords with scrupulous clarity, neglecting in the process their reason for existence in preparing the violent release of the finale proper (not violent enough, in this case). That his priorities in this music lie elsewhere is underlined by the cool reserve of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its original version. The rough and semi-sacred edges have been buffed away, like a restored icon gleaming in the window of an upmarket dealership. If you wanted to discover how far Spanish orchestral culture has come since the days of Argenta, however, you could hardly do better than to start here.