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I make no apologies for returning to the endlessly fascinating subject of Mendelssohn’s connections with Birmingham and the Town Hall.

Recording company Chandos has just released the first volume in its Mendelssohn in Birmingham series, recordings of the complete Mendelssohn symphonies as being currently set down by the CBSO under its principal guest conductor Edward Gardner. The first issue is a cracker.

Let’s begin technically, with a testimonial to the remarkable quality of this Super Audio CD with its surround sound. We get a palpable sense of occasion and Town Hall atmosphere from these performances recorded at the end of last October, and, as many of us have experienced it on other occasions, we can also sense Mendelssohn sitting on the conductor’s shoulder during this unfolding of his masterpieces in the building he knew and loved so much (and indeed helped design, in terms of the organ-loft).

And the packaging is a treasure in itself, with a pasticcio of Mendelssohn’s own pen-and-ink sketches of Birmingham on the cover (he was a talented visual artist as well as being a brilliant composer, conductor, pianist and organist) and elegant, informative programme-notes from Gerald Larner and Bayan Northcott. The booklet quite properly acknowledges the contribution of Birmingham City Council and Arts Council England to this highly important recording project.

So to the performances themselves, with Gloucester-raised Edward Gardner confirming that he is at the forefront of his generation of English conductors, and well deserves his sought-after status around the world. The important thing is that he, like Andris Nelsons, like Sakari Oramo, like Walter Weller, like Paul Daniel, like Andrew Litton, and certainly like the much-missed Sir Charles Mackerras (to name some of the CBSO’s conductors over the last couple of decades), puts music before ego.

The Hebrides Overture launches the programme, tempi affectionate yet always well-judged.

Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony (though actually his second in order of composition), the Reformation, is, for a Jewish-born composer, a surprising advocacy of Lutheranism with its magnificent fugue on the Protestant hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. But the religious mix is confused with the work’s frequent recourse to the Dresden Amen, as would a few decades later be employed so emphatically in Wagner’s sanctimoniously Catholic opera Parsifal.

Never mind all that. Gardner’s unfolding is like that of a symphony by the innocently religious Bruckner, weighted and balanced, sometimes hushed, sometimes exultant. Worth revisiting all of this, and not for just the Classic FM bits.