Klaus Tennstedt was already seriously ill when these two performances were recorded, and already becoming something of the legend the BBC label suggests. His last appearance was in Oxford in 1994, when, haggard but somehow beaming, he falteringly entered the Sheldonian Theatre to receive a richly deserved honorary degree and then, though not strong enough for all the subsequent lunch, insisted on rehearsing the University Orchestra. His capacity for dominating his fragility seemed to give his best performances an extraordinarily moving quality, and this glows here especially in the Glagolitic Mass. Janácek was not one of his specialities, and it is possible to find a more authentic sharpness and force in performances by Mackerras and Kubelík, but there is much here to admire: the breadth of the phrasing, the weight and sense of the music’s importance he draws from the brass, the exquisitely balanced textures in the Agnus Dei and the Sanctus (very well caught in this recording), the care for the chorus’s role in the Credo, with their soft intonation “Veruju” set against splendid assertions from Robert Tear that seem to brook no dissent.

The Bourgeois gentilhomme suite makes an odd coupling and is in some ways less satisfactory. The recording is not always so clear in singling out the admirable orchestral soloists, who include an elegant oboe and the lively, leaping leader for the fencing master, not to mention a fine solo cellist. The dinner party goes with a swing, even if listeners new to the work may be puzzled by quotations for whose explanation the booklet-note writer has not been given space.