Urbane, modest, uncomplicated and entirely self-possessed, Karel Ancerl makes an unsatisfactorily self-effacing interviewee for the same reasons that his recordings still compel attention. The question posed by a half-hour biopic for Czech TV, Who is Karel Ancerl? , goes largely unanswered apart from periodic returns to a fascinating rehearsal of Beethoven’s Second with “his” Czech Philharmonic: straightforward, emphatic, uncompromising Beethoven of the kind which London audiences have lately enjoyed from Jirí Behlohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. “Very energetically, OK?”; “Let’s keep the sound even more chamber-like” – these are the guiding lights of Ancerl’s Missa solemnis (on Tahra), his Slavonic Dances, his Rite of Spring and much else besides for Supraphon.

He is as painstaking in this rehearsal to elucidate dialogue over local concerns of tone or idiom as he is in a none the less fiery concert of Má vlast recorded at the opening of the 1968 Prague Spring Festival: a momentous occasion in several respects, not least because Ancerl would emigrate to Canada just months later, but there are no overbearing signs of the times unless they be heard in the abrupt and (where the score calls for it) brutal dispatch of Šárka. Elsewhere, all is juice and joy. Ancerl encourages the wind and brass soloists to enjoy themselves, and Smetana’s quirkily winding phrases, to the full, while always pressing on. This is not business-like or metronomically nervy but the mark of a musician who always has the end-point in view.

I’m surprised that Supraphon couldn’t come up with a more engaging filler than this Beethoven Concerto from the same hall two years previously, where Ancerl apparently cedes to Szeryng on regal autopilot: a thoroughly professional execution all round. Even in the egotistical arena of conducting, the benefits of self-effacement have their limits.