John Barbirolli came to Wagner in an age when orchestras were often smaller, pitch lower, and good conductors routinely versed in the art of cossetting singers. As Mike Ashman reminds us in his note, Barbirolli’s earliest Wagner recordings were made with such stars of a golden age of Wagner-singing as Lauritz Melchior and Frida Leider.

Had Anita Välkki (1926-2011) been born into such an age, she might have had a longer career singing Wagner. She didn’t soar and burn as did the likes of Ludmila Dvořáková and Ursula Schröder-Feinen in that newly hectic age which was the 1960s. She simply did her bit then stepped off the international Wagner treadmill to return to her native Finland.

She first appeared in England in 1961, when Solti engaged her to sing Brünnhilde in a new Covent Garden production of Die Walküre. (A live BBC transmission is now available – Testament, 4/15). Here, as there, she reveals herself to be a Brünnhilde of lyric grace: bright-toned but not over-bright, good with words. Barbirolli, for whom Frida Leider’s fine-spun legato and purity of phrase would have been a still active memory, accompanies her superbly. The mono sound coaxed from Manchester Town Hall by the BBC engineers is somewhat recessed and a touch boxy. But the ear adjusts.

As far as I know, Barbirolli made no commercial recording of Mozart’s late G minor Symphony. It is, as one might expect, a lyrical reading, lovingly sung through tempi which are unhurrying yet never inert. Like Bruno Walter in his late Columbia SO recording (Sony, 12/63), Barbirolli treats the first movement as an Allegro assai. Mozart’s marking is Molto allegro, a tempo which can electrify sense but which in the wrong hands can mask that deeper and no less dramatic strain of melancholy which a slower pulse can reveal.

What shines out here, both in the Mozart and the Wagner, is music-making of unforced humanity under a conductor whose mastery of the nowadays vanishing art of creating and sustaining a properly sung orchestral legato is never in question.