Semyon Bychkov has been gathering golden opinions of late, both for the clarity and lucidity of his Strauss conducting and for his stewardship of the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne (Günter Wand’s old stamping-ground). An acclaimed account of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony given in London in December won fresh laurels for conductor and orchestra.

Bychkov made a name for himself in the West after leaving Leningrad in 1975 at the age of 23. In 1985, Karajan went so far as to mention him – probably mischievously – as a candidate for the Berlin succession. Where Brahms is concerned, his Soviet background will have done little to help. With the exception – a glorious one – of Kurt Sanderling, there are no Soviet conductors whom we immediately associate with Brahms. So where has Bychkov landed and how does he see the music?

The answer is, in a logical, clear-sighted way, more after the manner of Weingartner or Boult than Furtwängler or Sanderling. Though he doesn’t seat the orchestra classically, he uses a classically sized orchestra. Texts are clean. Textures reflect Brahms’s interest in a pre-Wagnerian sound world. Our sense of Brahms’s relish of Harmoniemusik – music for wind ensemble – is never far away in performances where an audible and occasionally eloquent bassoon can be heard underpinning flutes and oboes.

The results, for the most part, are unexceptionably fine, even if the readings don’t always scale the heights of some rival versions. In his review of Klemperer’s late-1950s Brahms cycle – superbly remastered for EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century – Rob Cowan spoke of ‘the clarity and cumulative power’ of the performances and their ‘consistent appreciation of Brahms’s musical logic’. Bychkov appreciates the logic – in the First and Fourth Symphonies, the finales especially – but doesn’t always have that degree of cumulative power. Is this the result of too great an emphasis on the cleanly executed moment in hand and a lack of a commanding long-term rhythm, or simply the case of a consciously constrained personal vision? A little of both, perhaps.

The finale of the Third Symphony might be thought to be a case in point, yet in the two inner movements, where a more personal view is evident, the results are compelling, the pastoral, slightly folksy Andante shrewdly contrasted with a rapt rendition of the Poco Allegretto that confirms its status as one of Brahms’s finest elegies. Bychkov’s account of the Second Symphony is clear, emotionally civil, finely played. It barely glances at the music’s twilit hinterland but any performance which captures, as this does, a sense of the music being at one with itself is already halfway to heaven.

The very clean texturing Bychkov gets from the orchestra is faithfully reflected in the recorded sound, though there are one or two moments – such as a less than precise chord shortly before the end of the slow movement of the First Symphony – that take the gloss off a production and playing which, in every other respect, are splendidly shipshape.

As for rivals, the set cannot compete on price with the memorable mid-price Klemperer cycle or two budget-priced rivals: the legendary, and very different, Sanderling (three CDs) and the celebrated 1980s Wand (two CDs). Wand’s performances, similarly conceived to Bychkov’s, have a certain added loftiness and reach, though it would be idle to suggest that the sound is as fresh as it is on this very approachable new set.