Virtually every conductor worth his salt has recorded Brahms’s First Symphony. But Klaus Tennstedt’s and the London Philharmonic’s performance, taken from a 1990 Royal Festival Hall concert, leaves an indelible impression because it is so glowing and warm-hearted. Here there is a superb sense of the first movement’s immense power and the greatness that Brahms only achieved after a characteristically long and selfcritical gestation. Everything has time to breathe and speak in this least febrile of performances. The Andante sostenuto’s lyricism and the Elysian Fields conjured in the following Un poco allegretto e grazioso could hardly be more hauntingly contrasted; the unleashing of Brahms’s aweinspiring grandeur in the finale’s final pages achieves all the exultance Hugo Wolf so obstinately denied in Brahms.

Jorge Bolet, who now makes a belated appearance on BBC Legends, once claimed that speed is the enemy of excitement, but his celebrated “divine slowness” could be a more culpable offence. The sad fact is that by the time Bolet achieved international recognition he had become subject to bouts of depression leading to playing that could be prosaic and earthbound. Although he was acclaimed from continent to continent, his glory came ironically late and his way with the Schumann Concerto, here taken from the Festival Hall in 1984, while solid and dependable is also dull and lethargic. Hopefully BBC Legends will rescue other performances that show him at his grandest and most aristocratic. Tennstedt’s is the most distinguished contribution to this reading but the disc is still worth acquiring for his Brahms, particularly when so successfully transferred.