The mono recordings here are variable. The Beethoven Piano and Wind Quintet is distant and subfusc, and not ideally balanced, although the sound is well integrated, and the ear adjusts. But Dennis Brain’s horn part certainly comes through, and Benjamin Britten leads throughout quite delightfully on the piano: he makes the slow movement sound all but Mozartian.

As ever with Gordon Jacob’s music, his Piano and Wind Sextet is most felicitously scored and full of attractive ideas. Composed in memory of Dennis’s father, Aubrey (a comparable horn virtuoso in his time and a principal of the BBC Symphony Orchestra) four of its five movements are ingeniously thematically based on the musical notes ABEBA taken from Aubrey’s name. The opening and closing sections are elegiac; then comes a brilliant scherzo, and here the rather too forward recording is very close indeed: Gareth Morris’s piccolo solo comes right into the room! The slow movement, a B flat minor ‘Cortège’ (‘B’ again) is again melancholy, gently touching; the Minuet is utterly charming, and the boisterous finale (syncopated in a very British way), is joyously spirited, but with a recurring lyrical horn theme which Dennis relishes.

He then gives a superbly confident account of the waywardly lyrical, if at times marmoreal, Hindemith Sonata which was written for him (as early as 1939). His splendid partner, Noël Mewton Wood, a strong personality in his own right, is in no way dwarfed. In the slow move- ment his filligree playing is memorable and elsewhere the distinctive character of his contribution is a great asset. Here the recording is well balanced, as it is in one of Dennis’s favourite encores, Gilbert Vinter’s infectious lollipop, Hunter’s Moon, thrown off with characteristic panache.