This Bremen Beethoven cycle has emerged as a fiercely competitive, possibly unstoppable front-runner in the chamber orchestra stakes. Earlier reviews by Rob Cowan (Symphonies Nos 3 and 8, 1/08, Nos 4 and 7, 8/08) have described to perfection what he calls the “high-spec” playing of this virtuoso chamber group, something that is everywhere evident on this latest disc. Once again we can marvel at the point and vitality of the playing, at the extraordinary micro-management of phrasing without affection or arrest, at the scrupulous balancing of the inner parts – not least the etching-in of Beethoven’s often aurally elusive bass-lines and pedal-points. If the account of the Second Symphony is, in the final analysis, a touch relentless, that of the Pastoral suffers from no such flaw. It is a buoyant, clear-eyed reading, spruce and shrewdly paced in the movements that precede the Storm, yet not afraid to linger in the further reaches of the Shepherds’ Song of Thanksgiving before the muted horn sounds its lonely curfew.

Admiring though he was of those earlier performances, Rob Cowan envisaged times when he would want a more rugged or more momentous approach to the music. An element of human warmth is what I miss amid all the spick-and-span. That can be found elsewhere no doubt. Here there is much to delight and excite.