Daniel Barenboim was supposed to perform with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this month. His recent health concerns made that impossible, but it was a reminder that for the first time since the appointment of the late Libor Pesek in 1987, the RLPO is under the direction of a conductor soaked in the German tradition. Domingo Hindoyan, the orchestra’s chief conductor since autumn 2021, was born in Venezuela and has a soft spot for French music, but Barenboim is his mentor and there’s a gravity – an intellectual centre – to his conducting that made me eager to hear him get to grips with the sacred monsters of German romanticism.

It’s something of an RLPO tradition, after all. Max Bruch – whose Scottish Fantasy opened Hindoyan’s programme – moved to Liverpool in 1880 as the orchestra’s chief conductor, taking a yellow-brick semi near Sefton Park and inviting the likes of Joseph Joachim to Merseyside. Bruch and Joachim actually premièred the Scottish Fantasy in Liverpool, presumably (the original Philharmonic Hall burned down in 1933, but the current hall occupies its footprint) on more or less the precise spot where the violinist Timothy Chooi stood for this performance: feet apart, head bowed over his instrument, bobbing, swaying and occasionally sidling over towards Hindoyan or the harpist Elizabeth McNulty, who was sitting up front by the second fiddles.

If there was the occasional Highland squall in Chooi’s high passage-work, it was offset by acres of rich, peaty low G- and D-string sonority: sultry, smoky, and smoothed along by tasteful (but unembarrassed) portamenti. The Scottish Fantasy isn’t as popular as it once was; in death, as in life, Bruch has never really shaken his reputation as Brahms’s Mini-Me, and his First Violin Concerto has fallen from the Classic FM Top Ten without winning its composer his rightful place alongside Cilla Black, Sonia and the Fab Four on Liverpool’s Mathew Street Wall of Fame. Certainly, I don’t recall hearing the Fantasy sounding quite so Heifetz-y; but a sort of retro, pre-war tone quality is currently fashionable among younger string soloists. There’s a thesis to be written on the YouTube-ification of performance style in an era when a century’s worth of interpretations can be streamed in seconds. Personally, I’m all for it.

After the interval, Hindoyan conducted Bruckner’s Romantic symphony, which is always a bold move in the Philharmonic Hall. That glorious art deco auditorium has many strengths – not least the fact that it’s one of the UK’s few remaining orchestral venues where audience members can risk a discreet cough, or rustle a programme sheet without sounding as though they’ve discharged a firearm. But one thing that the Philharmonic Hall can’t provide, even after successive upgrades, is a sense of cavernous, echoing emptiness – exactly the atmosphere that Bruckner requires at the beginning of this symphony.

Hindoyan couldn’t do much about that. What he could do was encourage inner lines to sing and speak, and to decline to wallow or linger over the view. One result was a near-classical purpose and pace: Bruckner’s sprawling finale felt and moved almost like Haydn. The other – a paradox of sorts – was that this level of concentration and clarity heightened the poetic qualities of the music, generating a mood of eloquent, autumnal melancholy in the slow movement (the RLPO woodwinds really sing as a choir), and allowing the string sound to coalesce into great misty banks of tone: sensuous without being over-saturated, and handled by Hindoyan with a sculptor’s feeling for texture. This was a stirring, sophisticated interpretation from an orchestra and a conductor whose partnership seems to have been fully formed from the off.

One fewer to worry about, then. Several UK orchestras (including Bournemouth and the two big Manchester bands) face imminent regime change on the podium, and a few more (discretion forbids) have made solid rather than thrilling recent appointments. With the LSO, the soon-to-depart Simon Rattle conducted a concert performance of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova which with the best will in the world – and singing to match (Simon O’Neill as an ardent Boris, Amanda Majeski glowing as Katya) – didn’t quite cut to the anguished, tear-stained core of the piece.

It’s difficult to say why. The orchestral playing was beyond silken and the details of Janacek’s orchestration (the jagged stabs of brass; those weird, unnerving high timpani shots) gleamed. Rattle is always good at the detail. Something about the flatness of the concert format, perhaps? The singers wore evening dress, coming and going behind music stands: pretty standard stuff but these days, especially with this team, we’ve come to expect more. Or the decision to play it without an interval – which conveyed a certain urgency, but also suggested that they wanted to power through and get it over with? One way or another, it all felt too easy.