Just what the world needs, another cycle of Villa-Lobos symphonies? Well, one thing becomes clear from the get-go – Carl St Clair and the Stuttgart SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra, who cut a late-1990s/early-2000s Villa-Lobos symphony cycle for CPO, are outshone by the São Paulo SO and Isaac Karabtchevsky. That much, perhaps, you would expect. Karabtchevsky and the orchestra are on home terrain. But compare the opening moments of this new Sixth Symphony with the Stuttgart version and we’re palpably dealing with something grander than nuances of interpretation: Karabtchevsky makes Villa-Lobos’s zig-zagging, lopsided melodic line sound as boldly and brashly sculpted as Mount Rushmore, which, given that Villa-Lobos generated his melodic line by putting tracing paper over an image of the mountains around Rio de Janeiro, is exactly right.

Karabtchevsky’s steadier, more deliberate tempo helps. But what merely sounds ungainly and idiomatically clumsy in St Clair’s hands becomes musically engaged here. The Lento movement also benefits from his cutting Villa-Lobos some expressive slack. To continue the mountain-based metaphors, Karabtchevsky’s performance has a sense of ascent: you can hear the different strata, feel air blowing through the structure – neither of which St Clair’s ‘are we there yet?’ conducting provides.

True enough, neither man solves the problem of the finale, which feels like Villa-Lobos is desperately trying to contrive a valedictory leave-taking statement that his material isn’t up to. But this does bode well for Naxos’s projected complete Villa-Lobos symphony cycle, even if we are going to have to take the rough with the smooth. The Seventh Symphony, written in 1945, a year after the Sixth, is an utter mess: over-orchestrated to the point where the energy he is trying to unleash topples over into its own over-indulged flab, this is a reminder that few composers as brilliant as Villa-Lobos could screw up as badly.