In Conversations with Carlos, Charles Barber describes the singular record of Kleiber conducting Mahler as ‘invaluable’. It’s a word I’d more readily apply to his book than this performance, which is so wretchedly recorded that only a small fraction of what Kleiber may have done with the piece is appreciable, and no larger a fraction in this first ‘official’ release, which is recognisably from the same tape as its previous appearances on CD.

Waldemar Kmentt is able to disguise either lack of sympathy or familiarity by shouting his way through the first song – whether Kleiber is tweaking the orchestral balances to help him must remain an open question – but he blunders like the proverbial bull through the porcelain world of ‘Von der Jugend’; and although the audio dentists have done infill work on the crumbly gaps in the texture, removed some radio signal and tidied up a few noises off, they have thickened Kmentt’s already overbearing presence in the process.

Anyway, no amount of expensive restoration will disguise a lack of orchestral coordination, surprising given the frequency with which the VSO had played the work during the previous decade but which may be set down to fatigue. This is detailed by the booklet-note, which goes on to record how the various diametrically opposed critical reactions to the performance at the time produce ‘a zero-sum game’. Apparently Kleiber took over from an ailing Josef Krips for a concert in the middle of the three-week Wiener Festwochen celebrating the centenary of Mahler’s birth. He had four rehearsals, the same as everyone else. This is not quite the tale told by Barber, who has Kleiber beetling off to Klemperer for Mahlerian advice late in 1966. So does Heyworth’s Klemperer biography.

As can happen in Das Lied, the performance gradually finds its feet. Kmentt finds a version of mezza voce for ‘The Drunkard in Spring’, while Kleiber communicates tempo shifts that are more than wrenching on the gears. Which brings us to Christa Ludwig. Her experience in performance must have had an inestimable value compared to any words of advice; her shaping of the text leads all that is best about the performance. Magnificent as she is, her concerts and recordings with Klemperer, Reiner and Karajan offer more wholly engrossing experiences.