Here are two more unique but imperfect documents of a fondly remembered, old-school maestro. Nowadays Barbirolli isn’t thought of as a Beethoven conductor but his 1967 Eroica is still in circulation (Dutton, 7/97) and he set down the Fifth commercially 20 years before that. Lyndon Jenkins’s booklet-notes speak admiringly of the conductor’s approach – “fundamentally straightforward and true to the score, clear of texture, properly rhythmic, and essentially dynamic”. Younger listeners certainly won’t hear this performance that way, and not just because the dingy mono sound doesn’t allow detail to register.

With Sir John’s trademark warmth and weight of tone poorly conveyed, there’s a risk that the lack of unanimity at the start of both the Beethoven and the Shostakovich may cloud one’s judgement of the whole. Forget the untidy ensemble though and the playing has passages of vitality and élan as well as heaviness, finales surprisingly driven.

Barbirolli’s sturdy conception of the Beethoven is convincing in terms of contemporary performance practice, whereas the Shostakovich tends to fall into sections. While you might admire the lyrical shaping of the first movement’s “leggy” second subject, his precipitate treatment of the development doesn’t really work. As with Bernstein, Previn and other Sixties exponents, the last movement wears a generally optimistic face.

How to sum up? Die-hard aficionados, nostalgists and completists will rejoice, yet I sometimes wonder what these posthumous reclamations are doing to Barbirolli’s reputation. Hear an off-air recording as incendiary as say, Carlos Kleiber’s conducting of Beethoven’s Fifth in Chicago, and you’ll question why anyone should want to disseminate this palpably inferior account.