Another month, another in-house label from a leading orchestra. This is not the place to discuss the phenomenon itself – low budget recordings made for an age in which cost rather than quality is the principal motivator – though this particular disc highlights one obvious problem of putting concerts on CD. Programming Beethoven’s Second alongside Brahms’s Second might work in the concert hall – or as the centrepiece for a convention of the Friends of D major – but as a recording coupling it is a collector’s nightmare.

The disc does have a certain spurious unity inasmuch as Jansons and his orchestra manage to make Beethoven sound as though he was Brahms’s near contemporary – a trick which, if you’re going to attempt it, should be tried the other way round. You don’t have to be a convert to the cause of period instruments to want something rather more bracing than we have here. The finale cuts a dash but the Larghetto is astonishingly suave and somnolent.

The performance of the Brahms may well win golden opinions but it, too, has its bland side. Jansons’s shaping of the music is unexceptionable and the orchestral playing is mostly extremely beautiful – which may be part of the problem. Hair’s-breadth delays in approaching a phrase stifle rhythm in lyric passages. Nor is there much light and shade here. There is a dark, at times chilly, side to this work (the darkness-before-dawn ushering in of the finale’s recapitulation, for example) which Jansons and his players hardly address.

The sound is closer and denser than we are used to from recordings made in studio conditions on the floor of the Concertgebouw. Nor are perspectives as stable as they might be. I noted instances of solo winds appearing over-prominent in accompanying passages, too retiring in solo ones. In the brave new world of pseudo-recording that is ‘orchestra live’, whose responsibility is it to sort such things out?