I wonder if any students who leapt off Magdalen Bridge on May 1 last year made their bedraggled way to the Sheldonian for a trenchant reflection on their midsummer madness? Barenboim might have joined them in days gone by; now his flaunted anachronism is to out-Knappertsbusch everyone in the Wagner Prelude and squeeze a sound that fills the Berlin Philharmonie into a space a quarter the size. Six double basses counts as the BPO Chamber Orchestra. This is perfect for the Elgar but works less well in the Brahms. Barenboim conveys a superb vertical grasp of the argument. Everyone knows where they stand and act. But his spans are larger than Brahms’s own: if you think of the first movement as a sine wave, Barenboim’s shapes are too broad, not to say artificial, so that the second half of the first-movement exposition must slow to a crawl – a tense crawl, but a crawl all the same – while the last few bars into the recapitulation are already thundering towards their goal with a momentum that doesn’t allow the clinching bass-line to register as such: it’s too absorbed into a flow larger than itself. It’s bold and impressive and sweeps us along with it but it’s not life-changing (as one enthusiastic reviewer claimed at the time) and it’s not really Brahms-changing either.

The Elgar, however, is gripping from the very start, fully charged with the emotion that one might expect to inflame Barenboim’s first return to the piece since accompanying Jacqueline du Pré. I have never heard the first movement projected so clearly and convincingly as one long span and it allows the whole of the concerto to unfold in one unbroken, elegiac song. The boldness of the conception would have been even more sustained had they taken the Adagio a notch faster, but how Alisa Weilerstein throws herself into those dicey upward sequences; her bow-hold is very high, like a violinist’s. She never holds back and takes some impressive risks, perhaps inspired by an accompaniment that convinces me, for the time, of the Berlin Philharmonic being the finest orchestra for Elgar, as well as for everything else.