Rouvali’s pacing, for the most part, feels instinctively ‘right’…The recording in Gothenburg’s wood-lined Concert Hall offers sonorous, yet clear lower textures, and if the high strings and trumpets occasionally generate a slight ‘edge’, this is not inappropriate to the Symphony’s more Tchaikovskian moments of passion. In all, this is a genuinely competitive release.

This is one terrific disc...Everything about this performance [of the Symphony] is clearly, startlingly defined. A penetrating ear is held to the score...The Gothenberg Symphony have rarely sounded more committed...So I doubt there’s a more gripping account of the symphony currently to be found – and it comes in tandem with an equally impressive reading of the 19-minute epic that is En saga.

The young Finnish conductor nails his vivid colours firmly to the mast in this first instalment of a projected Sibelius cycle with Gothenburg, which on this evidence will be cast in a completely different mould to the same orchestra’s grandly expansive recordings with Neeme Järvi in the 1980s. If the unsettling, proto-modernist account of En Saga gripped me more than the symphony, this is nonetheless a Sibelius series to watch.

There are chunks here, as in the filler tone poem En Saga, where the music-making positively blazes, waving the flag for an independent Finland, free from the claustrophobic embrace of Russia at the end of the 19th century. We get proof, too, of Rouvali’s skills in controlling speeds and balancing moods. Yet in interpretive terms Rouvali doesn’t do anything particularly remarkable.