I’ve asked this before, but is any composer since Haydn better at writing a humorous finale than Ernst von Dohnányi? The finale of his Symphonic Minutes is a fizzing little moto perpetuo for full orchestra, trimmed, polished and delivered in just under two and a half note-perfect minutes. Under Roberto Paternostro the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz play it with exuberant panache, and why wouldn’t they? Like so many of Dohnányi’s smaller-scale works, this is music that takes the sound of an orchestra, bursts it between tongue and palate, and savours the taste. All five movements in this performance are buoyant and zesty.

But Dohnányi’s massive five-movement First Symphony is a very different proposition – the young maestro, with roots somewhere between Vienna and Budapest, straining with every creative muscle to take possession of his classical inheritance. The key is a very Brahmsian D minor but in Paternostro’s performance – with a solo horn emerging from Wagnerian shadows – it’s the spirit of Bruckner that hangs over the opening bars and which characterises the symphony’s successively more epic climaxes.

There’s a feeling of purposeful – if occasionally ponderous – musical argument, which for me gives it the edge over Matthias Bamert’s lusher, more detailed but ultimately slightly affectless performance on Chandos. Paternostro delivers steadily mounting Hungarian passion in the swirling, folk-flavoured rhapsody that emerges from the second half of the Molto adagio. But his Scherzo is monochrome compared to Leon Botstein and the LPO; likewise Paternostro’s viola soloist in the fourth-movement Intermezzo plays it disappointingly straight. Botstein gives the symphony more personality, and more direction overall. But it’s a close-run thing, and it’s certainly nice to have the choice.