With an economy of means that would serve him well in years to come, the 26-year-old Brahms wrote a single, open-fifth viola chord to lead back into the exposition repeat of the A major Serenade’s first movement. On Mario Venzago’s new recording (Sony, 10/18) it’s almost inaudible, an apology of a transition. Riccardo Chailly treats it briskly as a means to an end. Not John Eliot Gardiner, who plants the chord (at 2'36") in Brahmsian soil and lets it ripen as a provisional answer to the bassoons’ harmonic question. Hanging in the Concertgebouw acoustic with a gentle, ruddy glow of pure tone, it yields a moment of taking stock before engaging once more with the movement’s chief and cheerful business.

A tiny point, perhaps, but one that attests to the care and affection illuminating every bar of the performance. For a more germane comparison I went back half a century, to one of the DG albums that brought Claudio Abbado’s name to the record-buying public. Almost identically balanced and paced, Gardiner brings a more rustic swagger to the Scherzo and more wind-blown chiff to horn and string accents. Under Abbado, the Berlin Philharmonic get into a tangle with Brahms’s compulsive hemiola havering in the Adagio; again, space and time and dabs of portamento work wonders for Gardiner, though the intonation at 3'33" is really too close for comfort. There’s a glorious, keening quality to the movement’s central clarinet solo, played by Timothy Lines, and both clarinets lead the way in an unusual, smoochy account of the Minuet where Gardiner makes up for lost time.

In matters of colour and timing, the playing of this early-Romantic repertoire has undergone its own revolution in the past 30 years. Under Goodman and Mackerras, even Minkowski, the Minuet of Schubert’s Fifth is neat but plain by comparison with Gardiner. Every phrase of the Andante is weighted and cherished. For its combination of tenderness, gravity and springtime joys, the performance may be set alongside Klemperer’s Philharmonia (with a first flute, Marlen Root, who has nothing to fear by comparison with Gareth Morris). The conclusion is quickly faded, but applause is retained after the Brahms. It’s a disc of pure delight.