Bernstein mavens familiar with these readings via the audio-only near-equivalents on the Yellow Label will know what to expect. In either format one encounters an idiosyncratic performance brand which, as James Hepokoski has suggested, can “compel primarily through the magnetic force of the conductor’s virtually sacramental, personal identification with the music”. In recent years, listening to Sibelius through Osmo Vänskä’s ears, we have been encouraged to detach the composer from his moorings in the Romantic tradition. Bernstein, unsurprisingly, takes him on a journey of his own.

The First Symphony, the product of Sibelius’s conscious determination to market his locally resonant, primitivist music to the wider world using Tchaikovsky and Borodin as models, meant a great deal to Bernstein. The highlight of the first concert he gave outside the United States (in Montreal), it featured in his last season too. He had come to treat it in a rather old-fashioned way, making frequent resort to massive sonorities and moulding every phrase deliberately, as if to emphasise its debt to those Russian masters. Against the odds, the result is a totally memorable interpretation operating at a higher voltage than almost any other. We can observe now how much the orchestra’s intensity and commitment delights the man on the rostrum, noting also the hugely enthusiastic response of a Viennese audience not always partial to this repertoire.

A dogged quality blights the rest. The Fifth fares best even if its generally slow pulse leads to some loss of intensity, even the odd awkward corner. Bernstein is not, I believe, interested in romanticisation as such. Instead pedal points are weighted and structural markers underlined as if to point up how Sibelius’s hard-won processes create, in Robert Simpson’s terminology, “a vast slow motion of their own, like that of the sky as the earth rotates, while upon the planet’s surface there is teeming human and animal movement.” If the Seventh has its moments, the Second, on a separate disc and filmed in 1986 with the conductor sometimes looking the worse for wear, will surely disappoint. Without greater forward momentum this most rhetorical of symphonies never achieves lift-off (except perhaps in the Scherzo).

Presentation is marginally below the standards of previous Unitel reclamations on other labels. No attempt has been made to find a common stylisation for on-screen titling and the documentation states that all these concerts took place in the same venue – we can see that they did not.

A curate’s egg. But can you afford to miss Bernstein’s incandescent Sibelius First?