The young(-ish) musicians of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta here celebrate the 25th anniversary of their ensemble in style. The care that has gone into the recordings is evident from the accompanying DVD, which concentrates on the C minor Chamber Symphony (Op 110a, arranged by Barshai from the Eighth String Quartet) and shows the five section leaders taking responsibility for the overall concept of the interpretation, then working out details with their sections, before putting the whole thing together for conductorless performance.

But you don’t need to see behind the scenes in order to respond to the end product. The playing has individual distinction and corporate unity of purpose. The choice of tone-colours, the thrust and defiance in fast movements and the matching of nuance to the range of quieter moods make for a fine combination of chamber-music finesse and orchestral weight. And not only in the C minor Symphony. Barshai’s arrangement of the Tenth Quartet (Op 118a) can rarely have sounded as convincing as this – hear the way the probing explorations of the first movement and the sly strategies of the finale balance the more straightforward vehemence and passion of the inner movements.

Weinberg’s Concertino is highly characteristic in its blend of wistfulness and subdued energy (with shades of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto). It is surely one of the finest pieces he – or any of his Soviet colleagues for that matter – managed to compose in 1948, the year of the ‘anti-formalist’ campaigns. Candida Thompson and her band are more than a match for their Naxos rivals, who sound rather sleepy by comparison.

I suppose I have to note that the sour taste of a misprint in Barshai’s transcription of the Eighth Quartet (at 1'28" in the finale) is here faithfully reproduced, as it is on several other recordings; consultation of the quartet original could so easily have guarded against it. But I would rather concentrate on the high quality of the playing and recording quality, and therefore give the disc a warm welcome to the catalogue.