Last year Accentus released the complete inaugural concert of Andris Nelsons as Gewandhaus-kapellmeister (11/18) and it’s a shame that their first touring programme together has been decapitated. Is the prospect of 10 minutes of Thomas Larcher – a new commission, Chiasma – really that scary?

Still, the concert’s torso makes sense on its own terms – a pair of late and tragic symphonies – and so do the cultivated polish of the Gewandhaus players and the fluent phrase-making of their maestro. A sober, old-world restraint permeates their Mozart, down to the conservative omission of second-half repeats from both slow movement and finale. Close your eyes and you might think you were listening to Nelsons’s predecessor in post, the 90 year-old Herbert Blomstedt – except that Blomstedt’s live Bavarian Radio recording (BR Klassik, 10/18) has all the ‘undertow of danger’ and ‘drive and determination’ missing from this neatly tailored account with its cute echo effects and theatrical dynamics.

If ‘effortless naturalness’ is what you’re looking for in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, then this beautifully balanced performance may please you no less than Nelsons’s CBSO recording (Orfeo, 9/11), which is cast from an almost identical mould. Stagy unwritten pauses and more dynamic interventions serve to wind up short-lived tension within an otherwise restrained and Classically moulded approach to the first three movements. However crisp the attack in the first movement’s Allegro, Nelsons never generates the momentum or pathos required if the remaining movements aren’t to feel like heterogeneous answers of their own.

Nelsons is an experienced master of the protracted silence, simultaneously attracting attention and deflecting it from himself – 50 seconds here, nearly two minutes after a War Requiem at the BBC Proms – but it’s a poor substitute for the kind of symphonic sweep, coherence and passion conjured in their different ways by Teodor Currentzis (Sony Classical, 1/18) and Kirill Petrenko (Berliner Philharmoniker, 7/19). For a recent, German-originated Pathétique film of almost continual revelation, look out ‘The Romantics’, Roger Norrington’s Stuttgart concert documentary on Hänssler.

One further caveat. If the programme appeals, invest in the Blu ray, which in both sound and picture quality is as different from the DVD as stereo from mono.