It has long been realised that Brahms’s Second Symphony is not as amiable as its lyric opening, major-key orientation and exultant end might suggest. “Light glimpsed from the heart of the forest” is how one writer has described the opening movement. Gardiner’s view of the movement is dramatic and dark-edged, more a continuation of the First Symphony’s grim mood than a contrast to it. And that mood never entirely goes away. Even in the symphony’s resplendent D major coda there is here more than a hint of anger and aggression.

The approach is well flagged. The choral works that precede the symphony strike a minatory note. I had half expected Gardiner to give us the great a cappella motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben? , Op 74. Also written in Pörtschach in the summer of 1878, it shares the symphony’s key centres and dark-light polarity. But no. We begin in C minor with a soul-grinding account of the Alto Rhapsody. If there is a connection here it is with the tortured trombone-led crisis in the symphony’s first movement development.

More Goethe follows: Schubert’s choral reworking of his own abandoned setting of “Gesang der Geister”. It is a strange piece, closer than the Alto Rhapsody to the symphony’s tragicpastoral mood. “Gruppe aus dem Tartrus”, in a choral and orchestral arrangement by Brahms, hurls us back into hell’s demesne before “An Schwager Kronos” allows us to glimpse the light.

Gardiner quotes Walter Frisch’s report that Brahms “disliked metronomic rigidity and lack of inflection on the one hand, fussy overdetermined expressivity on the other”. In the first movement, he and his period instrumentalists strike exactly that balance. This is characterful music-making, complex and subtle.

What follows is less agreeable. The Adagio, whose opening cello line Brahms marks poco f espressivo, has here an unyielding demeanour. The tempo is the same as Furtwängler’s in his unforgettable 1952 Munich performance with the Berlin Philharmonic but where Furtwängler draws sublimely nuanced song from players who have Brahms’s music deep in their collective memory, Gardiner prefers to lecture us in manly prose.

Furtwängler was a master of transition. Here too Gardiner can be unyielding. The extraordinary cold-light-before-dawn lead back to the finale’s recapitulation, which Tovey extols and which Toscanini rehearsed as if the world depended upon it, goes for next to nothing. Has the dauntlessness that so illumined the first disc in this series proved to be its successor’s undoing?