Poor old Max Bruch: a composer born to spin long lyrical melodies in a culture that demanded that its symphonists be Beethovenian supermen, and whose prickly, defensive personality masked the most tender of Romantic souls. In truth, Bruch’s three symphonies are a gift to a sympathetic interpreter, and Robert Trevino joins a select group of conductors (including Kurt Masur and Richard Hickox) who have succeeded in making these awkward but intensely lovable works sing.

Trevino has gone a step further, too: reinstating the discarded second-movement Intermezzo of the First Symphony and giving this a claim to be the most complete Bruch cycle currently available. But the main selling-point here is the playing of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra; a real asset in music that needs to glow from within. Bruch was a Rhinelander, and for all his slightly resentful hero-worship of Brahms (the First is dedicated to him and the finale of the Second opens with a melody that prefigures – and pre-dates – the equivalent theme in Brahms’s First) we’re a long way from Brahms’s windswept heaths.

This is music of rolling vistas, sunlit hillsides and good wine, and the sound of the Bambergers suits it beautifully. The strings have a satin sheen (for silk you’ll need to go to Masur and the Gewandhaus, still the benchmark in these works) and the all-important inner-voice blend of cellos, clarinets and horns gives the overall tone quality an unforced radiance. Trevino caresses those inner voices, shaping phrases with feeling but generally finding the right moment to pick up the tempo and start tightening the argument.

Sonata movements have room to bask in the sunshine but they never snooze. The horns are positively august in the Third Symphony, and while Trevino’s expansive reading really catches the sweep of the stormy, long-breathed Second, there’s an unforced freshness at the moments where Bruch lets birdsong flood in – passages ideally suited to the Bambergers’ lively but unaffected woodwind-playing. The same qualities – pace, colour and a general sense of being inside the composer’s style – are present in the collection of overtures and preludes that completes the second disc; music so appealing that it makes even CPO’s rambling booklet notes feel charming rather than inept.