Not only the violin-free opening movement but many points thereafter may remind us both of Giulini’s pedigree as a viola-player, with inner parts such as the clarinet in the fourth movement given space to bloom, and of the work’s exigent demands upon large choruses. The Edinburgh Festival Chorus is valiant, attentive to the many dynamic markings, more so than most large choruses who tackle the work, but sopranos and tenors are often found wanting above E, and on the many dying falls below it, which naturally occur once breath is at a premium.

Mike Ashman’s note refers to Giulini’s “lengthy traversal” for DG in 1987; but this performance is a minute longer, and in truth feels rather more than that. In that crucial fourth movement you would seek in vain the rhythmic precision that made Giulini’s Verdi so electric as well as devotional, and what is already a slow tempo drags and draws the life from Brahms’s gently bubbling triplets. Ileana Cotrubas lifts her movement with an affectionate but never affected contribution, but like everyone else here, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is better heard elsewhere, albeit that his mannered way with the text is virtually identical to recordings under Karajan and Kempe.

All of which is as may be given the flat, fuzzy murk of the broadcast sound as experienced here, which is no better or worse than if you or I had recorded it on a C90 tape from an indifferent tuner and let the cassette gather dust for 30 years. The end result shows both work and Giulini to hardly greater advantage than the same label’s rescension of a trudge through the B minor Mass (7/01), where the acoustic of St Paul’s produces a similarly depressing aural fog.