It’s all about timing. Eighteen months after the Berliner Philharmoniker elected the second Russian-born Chief Conductor in its 135-year history, along comes this invaluable record of the first. Whereas the family of Kirill Petrenko moved to Vienna the year after the Wall came down, Lew Ljewitsch Borchard (who de Russianised himself as Leo) went to Berlin.

The two conductors are also far less known to the musical public than their storied colleagues in post, from von Bülow to Rattle: a matter of choice in the case of Petrenko, who gives no interviews and has made next to no recordings. Quirks of history have kept Borchard in the shadows. As a student of Hermann Scherchen, he stood at the opposite artistic pole from Furtwängler, who guarded his power no less jealously than his eventual successor, Karajan; having been entrusted in the 1930s with concerts of the kind of classical pops repertoire on these Telefunken sides, Borchard would have been that successor had he not been shot by a jittery GI in post-war Berlin, three months after his appointment in 1945.

The greatest pleasure to be taken from this cheerful medley is in Borchard’s evident skill as a recording conductor. His understanding of the process, and its limitations at the time, is thorough. From the balancing of melody and accompaniment in Wotan’s Farewell, both within the orchestra and beneath Hans Reinmar, it is easy to understand why Klemperer used Borchard as a second pair of ears at the Linden Opera during one of his periodic crises of confidence.

The orchestration of a Mendelssohn fantasy suggests that ‘Andreae’ (presumably Volkmar Andreae, although the documentation is no more specific) was familiar with the composer’s own revision of his Octet Scherzo to fit within the First Symphony. No less than the Grieg, Boccherini and Tchaikovsky items, it reveals a French-style delicacy of response that could hardly be anticipated from the orchestra’s contemporary recordings with Horenstein and Furtwängler, and which it has taken Rattle’s tenure to uncover once more.

Put Rattle and Furtwängler side by side in the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No 88 and they sound uncannily identical. It is Borchard, doubtless fired by Scherchen’s ‘period’ scholarship and sensibilities, who comes close to a modern Haydn magician such as Thomas Fey with his teasing play of tempi and broad relish of a vernacular spirit to Haydn’s invention.