Dialogue in sound, from start to finish…that’s what these memorable performances are about. Time and again in both symphonies you can freshly appreciate how one instrumental desk takes its cue from another, how what you previously thought were subsidiary lines are suddenly infused with meaning. Why? Probably because Sándor Végh, leader of a great string quartet and celebrated participant in Casals’s legendary Prades music festivals, knew how to connect with his colleagues, forge a link, prompt a ‘speaking’ relationship where, being first among equals, he could inspire every musician to express his or her personality.

The style here takes warmth and rhythmic solidity as starting points, much as Casals did on his Mozart recordings many years earlier. Note the rustically rocking clarinet in the Minuet of No 39, or the gutsy attack of Végh’s approach to the G minor’s Minuet. Not for him an anxiously aggressive G minor Allegro molto first movement à la Furtwängler but more an elegiac oration, oppressively dark though fairly transparent. Both first-movement repeats are played and in the case of the G minor the two chords that lead to the development are slowed for extra emphasis. Ditto in the parallel episode of the finale, which hints at rhythmic disruption, not with quite the startling effect that Harnoncourt opts for on his recordings but pretty close. Who inspired whom, I wonder, if at all? Végh plays the first version of the G minor, without clarinets, a preferable option in my view. The Vienna Phil are on superb form: it’s as if they had suddenly become Végh’s band, and only his; and although their pooled tone is as distinct, as ever you can sense an interpretative genius at the helm. Good sound and minimally audible audience presence. Altogether a wonderful listening experience.