Anyone expecting the chromatic, expressionist post-Mahlerian idiom of Zemlinsky’s mature works will be surprised. As Fiona Maddox wrote in The Guardian: “At the stage when these early works were composed, Zemlinsky occupied a crevice between Brahms and Mahler.” He never crossed the musical Rubicon into atonality like Schoenberg (his brother-in-law) or Berg and Webern, but here the “Brahmsian” influence is more apparent than any nod to modernity.

Both works were composed in the 1890s but the conservatism of both is in striking contrast to the sheer genius of Mahler’s First Symphony, written years earlier. Both symphonies are essentially genial and life-affirming and seem to lack any sense of struggle between orthodoxy and radicalism, personal or creative. With the First, you’d think you were listening to Max Bruch or Stanford/Parry.

The Second is the longer and more ambitious, with a sprawling first movement that, like the scherzo, slightly outstays its welcome. Its coda is reminiscent of middle period Dvorák. The slow movement is charming rather than dramatic and the finale is simply too discursive to have any real effect, with none of the drama of Brahms symphonic finales, especially the awesome passacaglia of the Fourth. These works are not tepid and are...