By the time you read this, Philippe Jordan (son of the much-missed Armin) will have taken up the reins as the Vienna Symphony’s new Principal Conductor, and there’s no gainsaying that this live Pathétique possesses many solid virtues. Jordan conducts with innate musicality and sound judgement, and his eminently clear-sighted and totally unmannered reading is clearly the result of some meticulous preparation. What’s more, he has a lively ear, moulds phrases with imagination and care, and draws some strikingly alert, personable and beautifully blended playing from his new Viennese charges.

However, by the side of, say, Andris Nelsons and the CBSO or Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam PO, the music-making doesn’t quite attain lift-off, lacking something in interpretative incident, sheer temperament and strength of character. The Allegro con grazia second movement has elegance and polish to spare but drags its feet just a little in the doleful B minor second subject. By contrast, the scherzo benefits from being cannily paced (I do find Nézet-Séguin just a tad hasty and flashy here), though if I’m being honest there simply isn’t quite the same giddy sense of mounting excitement that Nelsons certainly manages to convey in his live Birmingham account. Still, the finale is strong and noble, all the more moving for its element of understatement, yet rising to a genuinely powerful pitch of intensity at its devastating fff apex at fig K or 6'47".Admirers of this particular partnership will doubtless need to no prompting to acquire; the majority, I suspect, may not be so easily persuaded.