If ever you needed a musical snapshot of Vienna between the wars, this is it. (Even though the Third Quartet was composed after WWII). The benign shadow of the elderly Brahms occasionally hovers; likewise, the less benign shade of Schoenberg ­ but – don’t worry, the music occasionally strains at tonality but never becomes atonal; and, most of all, there’s the hallmark warm, luscious, late Romantic lyricism of Korngold, Mahler’s true heir. The way he creates a sudden dissonance, a chromatic shadow and ensuing chill is very Viennese, as if reminding us not to just admire the flowers but to remember the dark sinister roots beneath. It’s the equivalent of the moment in Korngold’s film scores when Bette Davis accidentally discovers the love letters in a secret drawer – a sort of musical Freudian slip. The First Quartet is the most complex, yet beguiling, and the lyrical second subjects and main ideas radiate an almost operatic sensuality and at other times a hymn-like beauty. The Doric Quartet dispatch with insouciance what must be nightmarishly difficult filigree work in the perky intermezzo, while the finale uses Korngold’s musical motto Motiv des fröhlichen Herzens (Motif of the cheerful heart) which he liked……

I was amazed to read one review of this performance of Sibelius’s First Symphony which confidently asserted that Pietari Inkinen was to be congratulated on his achievement in effacing virtually all traces of Tchaikovsky from the music, as if that were a major criterion in assessing it! Inkinen is no young man in a hurry in Sibelius: his account of the First Symphony, at 40 mins, is one of the longest in the catalogue. His certainly doesn’t stint on the Romantic rhetoric either, pace my fellow reviewer. His reading is leisurely and well upholstered – poles apart from, say, Osmo Vänska’s trim, taut and terrific approach. These recordings are quite closely miked, meaning, inter alia, we hear plenty of harp throughout, especially in my favourite passage, the delicate section of the slow movement where sonic magic is made by the harp, woodwinds and triangle. Alas, the string sound is occasionally thin but, in general, the playing is distinguished and the timpani is well captured in the scherzo. In the unjustly neglected Third – just as elusive in its own way as the Sixth – Inkinen inclines toward steady tempos and I particularly like the way he manages the often awkward…