Given that Guido Cantelli’s career was cut tragically short by an air crash in 1956 (he was just 36 when he died), any document that chronicles his live concerts with the Philharmonia is to be cherished. Cantelli and the Philharmonia took all three works featured on this 1954 Edinburgh Usher Hall concert into the studio for EMI where vastly superior sound quality helped project the luminosity and textural refinement of their interpretations (all are available in EMI’s Cantelli ‘Icon’ set). Here tempi tend to be a little quicker, in one case (the finale of Debussy’s La mer) even where the printed disc timings are identical but in fact the concert performance is tailed by wild applause, which runs on after the performance has finished. It’s all part of the total timing.

In short, the first movement of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony is more driven, the penultimate movement of the Saint Sébastien Suite more sweetly expressive and the storm clouds and sea spray that greet La mer’s closing ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ generate higher levels of drama than on the studio recording. However, I wouldn’t want to mislead you into thinking that there’s a great deal in it: there isn’t, but the prominence of the live timpani which on EMI are integrated into the overall sound canvas gives the illusion that certain climaxes are so overwhelming that the engineers on the night were barely able to cope with them. I rather suspect that those in the hall who are able to compare will find more that they recall from the commercial records than from the tape used here, save for that extra rush of adrenalin. But, compromised sound aside, that rush makes this issue mandatory for all Cantelli fans.