From the first, there has been debate over how Brahms’s tragic Fourth Symphony is best performed. The logically minded Hans von Bülow conducted the premiere, but after taking over the subsequent tour Brahms reported, ‘In those concerts I couldn’t make enough slowings and accelerations.’ It was ever thus. Logic versus passion: Weingartner versus de Sabata, Toscanini versus Furtwängler. Then once in a blue moon the two are amalgamated, as in Carlos Kleiber’s phenomenal recording.

One thing the Fourth Symphony must have is a feeling of inexorability: clarity of texture linked to a sense of line and a continuing forward motion. And that, alas, is something the new Budapest performance rather obviously lacks, not least in the first movement, where an over-reverberant acoustic (at any rate where quiet wind and upper-string detailing is concerned) appears to have been too little noted by the conductor. Writing in these columns in April 1938, WR Anderson commended Weingartner and his Columbia engineers for allowing him ‘the best chance of recognising every phrase and every inner part, as well as allowing the breadth of the tragic drama to take hold of the mind’. Neither time nor advancing technology obviates the need for such care.

Fischer’s reading is on the slow side, though it is by no means the slowest on record. Barbirolli probably wins that palm with his gloriously sounded and yet still inexorable 1967 Vienna Philharmonic recording (EMI, 3/69 – nla). Fischer’s performance, however, often lacks impetus. Some of this is down to over-fussy detailing but there are times, such as the midway section of the great Passacaglia, where he is inclined to dawdle.

Judged by the clock, Fischer’s pacing bears certain similarities to Karajan’s 1978 Berlin performance (a model of classical severity) and Kleiber’s Vienna Philharmonic account. Sadly it has none of their tragic force. Nor is it in the same league where quality of recording and orchestral playing are concerned. As for the fill-ups, make of them what you will. To misquote Albany at the end of King Lear, ‘These are but trifles here.’