The 100-year-old Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra is a modestly sized ensemble from southern Sweden which plays on modern instruments. Its work may be familiar to collectors of the byways of Scandinavian music but this is the first time the orchestra has moved on record into the heartlands of the European repertory. The appointment of Andrew Manze as music director in 2006 has clearly had something to do with this. These Brahms performances, recorded in Helsingborg in 2009-10, suggest that Manze has brought an added subtlety and beauty to the orchestra’s string-playing. The wind-playing, on the other hand, some distinguished solo contributions notwithstanding, retains a somewhat stolid feel. Added to which, the orchestra’s saxophone-like horn sound is not exactly what one looks for in Brahms.

The Haydn Variations and the Academic Festival Overture are both finely done. Elsewhere what we have is work in progress, not only for the orchestra, which is evidently some way from establishing its own distinctive Brahms sound – there is more variegated colour in the Brahms symphonies than these performances allow – but also for Manze himself. Awash with insights and excitements though his readings are, he has yet to bring these within the fold of a settled vision.

The seriousness of Manze’s interest in the inner workings of Brahms’s music is evident in the 4000-word essay he contributes to the CPO booklet. His exploration of the echoes of Brahms’s own and other people’s music which can be found buried deep within the fabric of the four symphonies is particularly fascinating. He is on less certain ground, however, when it comes to the question of performance practices in Brahms’s own time. His idea that in Vienna in the 1880s first movements were played more quickly than they are now, slow movements more slowly, is based on such flimsy evidence, and is so open to counterclaim from the annals of later performing traditions, as to make it a very risky premise on which to base an approach to all four symphonies.

The consequences of Manze’s decision to press on in Brahms’s expositions and render costive and slow many of his more meditative passages can be heard in microcosm in a none-too-well-integrated account of the Tragic Overture (Sir Adrian Boult’s acid test where aspirant Brahmsians were concerned). Likewise, the speed at which Manze takes the first movement of the First Symphony is all very well until a brisk reversion to the status quo ante at the point of recapitulation subverts everything the development has thrown up for our consideration.

That apart, this is a refreshingly classical Brahms First, the best of the four performances, and Manze’s nicely inflected reading of the Second Symphony, the egregious horn sound notwithstanding, is not far behind. Elsewhere there is pleasure to be had from the finale of the Third and the Scherzo of the Fourth.