These Brahms performances derive from the Brahms and Szymanowski cycle which Gergiev and the LSO toured in the latter half of 2012. I heard the Edinburgh Festival cycle. In the opening concert Gergiev’s broad tempi and fondness for deep-pile sonorities in Brahms’s First Symphony sat somewhat heavily on the stomach after a kaleidoscopically beautiful account of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto in which Nicola Benedetti was the soloist. Still, it was an impressive occasion.

Sadly the Edinburgh experience did nothing to prepare me for the melancholy task of revisiting Gergiev’s Brahms on record. These are different performances, of course – or, rather, amalgams of performances and attendant patching sessions – taken from the later Barbican cycle. I should like to think that the editing explains the lack of continuity, though I fear the problem lies with Gergiev. WH Auden once said that two things interested him about a poem. What kind of a contraption is this? And what kind of fellow inhabits it? Where the Brahms symphonies are concerned, Gergiev doesn’t seem much concerned with either question. Such moments of interest as there are arrive more at Gergiev’s behest than Brahms’s. In the finales of both symphonies he drums up ovation-seeking perorations, though on the penultimate page of the First Symphony he gets so bogged down in his own magniloquence that an unmarked ritardando hobbles the rhythm (and thus the symphony’s ultimate point of arrival) in a most peculiar way.

Gergiev’s broadly drawn tempi – not unlike Sanderling’s in his fine 1971 Dresden cycle, though with a fraction of the intellectual and emotional grasp – make for an essentially ‘meditative’ approach to the Second Symphony. (‘Uneventful’ might be a better word.) Both here, and in Gergiev’s flaccid performance of the Tragic Overture, I found myself wondering how the LSO players were managing to engage meaningfully with the notes. At times they aren’t. The Haydn Variations and the Second Symphony’s third-movement intermezzo are stylishly realised but there are other occasions when the quality of the orchestral playing drifts below the standard we would expect of an elite international ensemble.