With violins and violas playing vigorously on their feet, John Eliot Gardiner’s latest project could brand itself “Stand up for Brahms”.

Someone has to. Or, rather, used to have to, given the insults dealt out to him by Tchaikovsky (“giftless bastard”), Shaw (“third-rate village policeman”) and others including Britten.

Fortunately, we’ve moved on. If words such as congested are still used about Brahms they’re usually referring to the apparently thick soup of his orchestration.

As Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique reveal, the problem is not poor Brahms but the vibrato-heavy corpulence of his past interpreters.

The results of this two-year enterprise are already audible in the First Symphony, on the Soli Deo Gloria label.

Saturday’s concert began with choral pieces by Brahms and his antecedents, variously a cappella or with harp, ­natural horns, bassoons.

The result was an episodic, but fascinating first half, full of imagery of hunting, the moon, tears, grief and death.

Had the singing of the Monteverdi Choir not been so ravishing, you’d have been reaching for your asp. This was a prelude to the Third Symphony, clear and as if excoriated like an X-ray plate.

The old cliché about period performance being akin to varnish being removed for once means something.

Just as when our Titians, now restored, almost scared us with their overpowering blue, so some of Brahms’s round melodic contours receded and a more jagged balance resulted.

If the gains, as well as losses, didn’t always convince, Brahms will never be allowed to sound the same again.