Rob Cowan found the First Symphony of this cycle heavy-set (3/11) and the Second pursues a similarly direct and unhurried course, through the first two movements at least. Setting the tone of the sound and performance is the solitary pizzicato at 1'16" that launches the main subject, a deft counterpart to the more explosive and extrovert moment in the First. I like the gradual gain of momentum through the Allegro towards the impassioned second subject and Simone Young holds back just enough at cadence points to acknowledge their importance. The rarely heard bridge back to the exposition repeat is particularly convincing, as though Brahms is weighing his ideas on a set of scales.

Try the span of the slow movement’s opening melody (all 1'20" of it): you can’t teach this stuff but it’s an object lesson in what Furtwängler saw as the hardest achievement of all, the creation of a genuine legato. Knappertsbusch used to do Brahms in this way: roughly hewn, brushing doubts aside, unsurprisingly north German, and no less authentic than Viennese or Meiningen-influenced perspectives offered recently by Mariss Jansons and Andrew Manze respectively.

The gossamer lightness of the pizzicatos in the Scherzo is perhaps exaggerated by a balance in which a solo flute can sound louder than a string section, and the finale is long on exhilaration but short on clarity (it takes Carlos Kleiber and the VPO, or Jochum and the BPO, to make sense of such a tempo), though none of the slips are as destabilising as the nasty slippage 0'50" into the opening of the First Symphony. The Tragic Overture, less fallibly played but also less surely proportioned, completes a fine release.