Inghelbrecht was in many ways a reliable conductor. That is, he could be relied upon to be demanding, bad-tempered, intransigent, honest, inspiring, and committed to the work in hand – not, then, a conductor to be wished at short notice on an orchestra unfamiliar with his ways. In his insert note, Alan Sanders refers to the lack of any documentation for the three-day recording session with Inghel and the LPO which was squeezed in at the end of a tour of Russia and Germany. To judge from the performance of Le carnaval romain and three movements from La Damnation de Faust, whoever thought up this notion probably did not come to regard it as ‘brightest idea of 1956,’ so perhaps the anonymity was deliberate. Not that the performance is bad; Inghel didn’t go in for bad performances. Everything is in place, tidy and energetic. But the Hungarian March in particular is rather solid and earthbound and betrays one or two problems with balance, while the phrasing in the other two extracts lacks that Berliozian fantasy which now comes more naturally to British orchestras, thanks to Sir Colin Davis.

One does not have to read far in any account of Inghel’s character to see that he might naturally have sympathised to some extent with Maréchal Pétain. He paid for this with temporary banishment after the war, but otherwise the French Radio Orchestra he founded in 1934 learnt to know him over a period of 30 years until his death in 1965.

In saying he was reliable, I do not intend to give the impression that he was always right. Together with his many positive attributes went an occasional wrong-headedness that I find hard to square with the sensitivity he shows elsewhere. In the ‘Pie Jesu’, for instance, from the Fauré Requiem he sets the decidedly smart pace of crotchet=63 in place of the composer’s Adagio, crotchet=44, and then allows poor Francoise Ogéas absolutely no leeway, not even for that magical surge of sound which leads into the return of the opening phrase. Notwithstanding, she sings beautifully, and I just long for one of those machines that alters tempo but not pitch.

At the other extreme he takes ‘Le Jardin féerique’ in Ma mère l’oye at a funereal crotchet=36, giving it all the allure of a building site. He also explains something to me that I have never understood, namely why Ravel withdrew his orchestration of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’. Seduced by the versions of Boulez and others, I have always felt Ravel was being unduly finicky here. But perhaps he heard it in a performance along Inghel’s lines, where it comes over as no more than a bag of orchestral tricks, an orgy of figurations. This version also contains, it must be said, one painful cor anglais entry (4'02") which presumably there was not time to retake.

But, those cavils aside, what treasures lie here! The verve, the lightness of touch belong to a vanished age, I feel, as in the entractes from Lakmé (from Acts 2 and 3, incidentally, not 1 and 2 as advertised). Then there is the range of colour he brings to Daphnis and the hard, brutal sound he gives to the pirate’s music – held in reserve until this point. Relish too the lovely flute playing of Fernand Dufrène, cool but touching and exquisitely phrased, and the delightfully fuzzy French contra-bassoon doing its best to be a terrifying Beast in Ma mère l’oye.

If I had to choose a favourite work from these three discs, it would be Fauré’s incidental music to Shylock (The Merchant done over à la française). Every note here is integrated into a performance of overwhelming elegance and sensuality. And when you’ve listened to it, I imagine you, like me, will be asking yourself why this marvellous score is not in the repertoire of every major orchestra.