Bernstein’s Brahms gets off to an unlikely start. He continues to bow to the audience long after it has ceased clapping, and raises his hands just an inch or two for the upbeat to the First Symphony: the VPO responds with controlled sobriety and decorous, dovetailed wind solos. With the picture off, you could continue to think you were listening to Boult and not Bernstein through the thrustful main Allegro and chaste Andante. Only in the finale do we see the shape of things to come, the alphorn’s call surely necessitating a concealed oxygen tank, and the two main tempi stretched to implausible extremes.

Thereafter we have an eisagesis of Brahms the tortured soul. Movement to movement, the experience can throw up disorienting revelations, but as with Celibidache – at similar speeds though to entirely different ends – the varied worlds of each work are obscured by a curdled angst entirely peculiar to this conductor and orchestra, the same sauce poured on four different meats.

The credits for DG’s films and its contemporaneous audio-only cycle do not tally – the audio producer for these videos was John McClure, long of CBS – so I can only assume that the performances are different, though they seem suspiciously similar in timing and detail. The Karajan cycle is similarly murky on background detail: the booklet states 1973 but the usually reliable Karajan-Centrum website carries no trace of it, though the first two symphonies were regular matches for first halves of Honegger and Stravinsky at the time. As usual, you only see the Philharmonie audience in the applause, which bursts in with unlikely (and in the case of the Third, insensitive) haste the moment the music stops.

Discrete identity for each work is not lacking here: by this time Karajan had created an orchestra that lived up to Legge’s ideal of style, infinitely adaptable unto its surroundings. The Third is impossibly sweet, strong on pulse and with a foreign surface of Biedermeier gentility. If not all, then too much is sweetness and light – after which the heft and fury of the finale’s allegro comes as all the more of a surprise – before a duly disappointing reversion to seamless legato for the chorale-coda. The Second finds every opportunity to stress minor over major in its balance of lines; nor are the clouds entirely dispelled by a relentless finale. The First and Fourth were always within Karajan’s field of vision, but I find these two performances rather sit back: calm and collected, too calculated, even until the final bars. NHK’s valuable DVD of these two works from Karajan’s Japanese tour with the VPO in 1959 shows us all too dramatically what had been, years before he started paying an extortionate dowry for the marriage of image and sound.