For a genuinely invigorating and refreshing take on Sibelius’s Symphony No 3, look no further than this new recording from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. The 36-year-old Finn, a familiar face to audiences in Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom in particular, where he heads up three orchestras, is a percussionist by training, conducts with balletic gestures, hunts his own food in the forests and likes to unwind with a sauna.

His interpretations are rarely routine: while some miss the mark, this is a sure-fire hit.If Sibelius often conjures images of ice and snow, of dark, mysterious forests, Rouvali offers a richer, more complete view. Take the first movement, in which his Gothenburg strings glow with golden warmth, and woodwind chirrup with cheery birdsong. As Andrew Mellor writes in his excellent booklet notes, this symphony marked the Finnish composer’s ecological awakening, after his move from living in the city to by Lake Tuusula. What Rouvali captures so well is a sense of tapping into an energetic flow, the pulse of life itself, generated by Sibelius’s motivic development.

Introspection is threaded through the Andantino...