The first of these two discs celebrates the 50th anniversary of Daniel Barenboim’s début recital in Buenos Aires and is given in the Teatro Colón. The second is of two performances (again live) with Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic at Erlangen and Munich.

Clearly, for his adoring public Barenboim can do no wrong and applause between every item in his recital is rapturous and prolonged. Yet listening at a distance in far-away London one is less easily bowled over by playing that is too often artful and attention-seeking rather than natural. So little is allowed its own head or voice; so much seems imposed from without.

In the Mozart there is a sense of a brilliantly gifted musician playing to the gallery with arch gestures and flip phrasing (try the finale) alien to the composer’s essential simplicity. Barenboim’s broad tempo for the first movement of the Beethoven, too, aided and abetted by much expressive pointing and underlining, invites lethargy and a lack of rhythmic focus, and in the finale his heavily weighted approach erases too much of the music’s inexorable momentum.

Charm comes heavily italicised in the Schubert and it is only on home ground in Ginastera and Resta (where Scott Joplin is taken, so to speak, on vacation to Argentina) that there is a truer sense of engagement. In the Ginastera Barenboim allows the music to grow to a sumptuously full-blown climax before a glowing retreat from such near operatic splendour, and if his performance of the Villa-Lobos is rough and ready it certainly has all the requisite spirit and verve.

None the less, such incidental successes are ironic considering Barenboim’s reputation in the classics of the repertoire, and it is sad to report that his performances of the Schumann and Tchaikovsky Concertos are, again, well below the standard you might expect from so seasoned and celebrated an artist.

The Tchaikovsky gets off to an disjointed start (Celibidache’s maestoso is chivvied aside by Barenboim) and the Allegro start of the concerto proper is far from con spirito; it is strangled, as it were, by so much imposed gravitas. The very slow tempo for the second movement (?) is an unpleasant rather than profound surprise and a sky-rocketing ascent above the written octave at 5'34" hardly compensates for so much dullness elsewhere. What joy there is in this performance comes chiefly from Celibidache (at 10'25" in the first movement he breaks free from his soloist to give us a tutti of the grandest martial splendour), but overall they make an ill-assorted pair, notably in the Schumann Concerto where Barenboim’s heavy-handed reading is the reverse of other more lithe and resilient performances.

Doubtless there will those who see such playing as a serious alternative to more overtly dazzling and dramatic accounts, but slow does not necessarily equal depth, particularly when so many sub-normal tempi are not backed by the necessary degree of pianistic brio and know-how. Caught on the right day Barenboim can play with a superlative command, sumptuous sonority and a musicianship at once imposing and richly communicative. Sadly, the majority of these performances, whether given in Argentina or Germany, form a poor reflection of his former glory.