This was my first encounter with the Italian cellist Mario Brunello. A pupil of Antonio Janigro and joint winner of the 1986 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he plays with great spirit and no little poetry; and, if he is not the most commandingly articulate, tonally seductive or full-throated protagonist of Dvořák’s masterly concerto you’ll ever hear, he generates a personable rapport with Sir Antonio Pappano. Few would claim that the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia is in the front rank but it responds with endearing eagerness here for its music director, who also manages to quarry plenty of stimulating detail from Dvořák’s exquisitely tailored orchestral canvas. Does the first movement’s second subject swoon a mite too indulgently? I think so. Long-standing allegiances to such luminaries as Rostropovich (with Talich and Boult), Fournier (with Kubelík and Szell) and Navarra (with František Stupka and Rudolf Schwarz) remain unchallenged but it’s easy to like a performance whose heart is always in the right place; indeed, those sublimely wistful reminiscences towards the work’s close are genuinely touching.

The account of the New World boasts comparable virtues, being abundantly characterful, pliable and consistently involving. Pappano possesses the happy knack of moulding a phrase to make it sound newly minted and he also sees to it that the melodies float and textures glow. On the debit side, his band is not in the luxury class, there are rather more coughs from the auditorium than is desirable and the finale’s effortlessly resourceful parade of earlier themes isn’t quite marshalled with the clinching inevitability that marks out, say, Karel Ančerl’s magnificent 1961 recording. I have a lot of time for Pappano – his readings are invariably engaging and supremely watchful – but ultimately this New World falls some distance short of the exalted standard of the already-mentioned Ančerl, let alone the great Rafael Kubelík’s wondrously subtle, vernally fresh and extraordinarily powerful broadcast performance from June 1980 with the Bavarian RSO.