Writing on Nézet-Séguin’s recording, with the Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra, of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (12/15), David Gutman commented: ‘As followers of the conductor will know, [he] can be mesmerically slow and oddly tensionless in late-Romantic repertoire.’ Not boding well for Sibelius, Edward Seckerson indeed found Nézet-Séguin’s recording of the First ‘flaccid, aimless and sprawling’, writing that ‘the whole performance fatally lacks imperative’. (8/19). The follow-up of Nos 3 and 4 impressed Peter Quantrill rather more, albeit not unequivocally (9/23). This new pairing of the Second and Fifth lies somewhere in between; while never mesmeric, neither is unacceptably slow when compared to the competition but both too often lack tension or drama. In the Second, for a work the premiere of which was a cultural event of national significance in March 1902, that is quite an (unwelcome) achievement.

It is not particularly a question of tempo: Okko Kamu’s two accounts (Berlin and Lahti) are noticeably slower yet generate considerably more excitement, as in the Tempo andante, ma rubato, reworked from abortive tone poems about Don Juan and The Divine Comedy. Next to Osmo Vänskä (whether in Lahti or Minnesota), the celebratory finale, Allegro moderato, sounds laboured, more like a dirge than a paean to life, or to burgeoning political freedom (as many in the first audiences chose to understand it – though the composer denied any such extramusical intent). Mind you, Mäkelä came a cropper here, too.

Matters are not much improved in the Fifth Symphony. The Montreal performance lacks drive, with little of the atmosphere of Kamu, Vänskä or, not quite as convincing in the fused opening movement, Mäkelä. Nézet-Séguin has a habit of letting the music pause momentarily from time to time; while that can work in No 2 – the first two movements, anyway, with their stop-start motion – in the Fifth, with its slow, even flow and build, it just lets the pace evaporate. Once again, Nézet-Séguin is not flattered by comparisons, and the ‘swan-hymn beyond compare’ never takes wing as it does in all the listed rivals. While these are not enervating accounts, neither are they recommendable, despite ATMA’s fine sound.