Both performances emanate from the final concert in Christopher Seaman’s final season (his 13th in all) as music director of the Rochester Philharmonic – a real gala occasion, you’d imagine, especially given the inclusion of the Serenade to Music (Vaughan Williams’s sublime 1938 tribute to Sir Henry Wood marking his 50th year as a conductor – and given here in its original guise with 16 solo singers).

All the more extraordinary, then, just how little sense of electricity there is to be found in the performance of the symphony. To be sure, Seaman draws some capable playing from his Rochester forces, though the strings are lacking something in tonal heft and allure (the unappealingly dry, close-set sound doesn’t help either). The booklet reproduces a typically supportive letter to Seaman from Sir Adrian Boult, who found the younger conductor’s February 1979 BBC broadcast of VW’s London to be ‘delightfully lively and right’. Sad to relate, any high hopes were quickly dashed, for the present curiously flaccid, disconcertingly lightweight display falls well short in terms of tension, temperament and poetry (the slow movement is especially disappointing). Or, to put it another way, the finished article pales next to the glories of, say, Sir Adrian’s own blisteringly cogent 1952 account for Decca, let alone the inspirational Hallé/Barbirolli 1957 recording (available from the Barbirolli Society). If up-to-date sound is a must, go for Handley’s idiomatic and characteristically selfless RLPO version (irresistible value on CfP).

I derived infinitely greater pleasure from Seaman’s sensitive and shapely handling of the magical Serenade to Music (which boasts some characterful and ardent singing from members of Rochester’s Mercury Opera Group) but it’s simply not enough to rescue the disc as a whole. In a word, uncompetitive.