Nothing gave me greater pleasure when listening to these three CDs than Gerald English’s performance of the Britten Serenade, his clarion, intelligently used tenor finding a perfect foil in Sir John Barbirolli’s warmly phrased account of the orchestral score. Much as I admire the justly celebrated recordings by Dennis Brain and Barry Tuckwell, Hermann Baumann’s full-bodied playing of the horn part, generously textured with just a hint of vibrato, lends an added dimension to an already variegated canvas. No disrespect to Pears and Britten, whose recordings remain credible benchmarks, but I would urge anyone who loves this music to acquire English, Baumann and Barbirolli in Cologne. They may well find it a revelation.

The remainder of the concert is satisfying but occasionally flawed. In the opening Adagio molto of Schubert’s Tragic Symphony, the first note of the strings’ first motif falls marginally off the beat, though the rest of the performance is beefy, purposeful and tenderly expressive. The Sibelius Second sounds quite different to its nearest Barbirolli rival, chronologically speaking, the 1966 EMI Hallé recording, where the woodwinds are more forwardly placed and the engineering is positively panoramic. This Cologne performance, although similar in its girth and impact, is less tidy, with the orchestra sounding fazed when they return their machine-gun fire after the solo oboe has marked a temporary truce in the Scherzo. The EMI recording is better, and Sir Mark Elder’s new Hallé version better still. His is a relatively contained view of the piece and although Elder’s total timing for the second movement is very close to Barbirolli’s, the two opening passages are miles apart, Elder swift and mobile so that there’s no need to rush at the first climax, Barbirolli’s a faltering ramble across misty thickets and bracken (though the actual playing is excellent). Osmo Vänskä’s ominous tread and monumental build-up are quite frankly more imposing than either. Elder is at his best in the first movement which, like the two tone-poems, is sensitively pointed and rhythmically supple, but the Andante seems to me to be holding something back, an element of fright perhaps, even near-hysteria such as is found by many other conductors from Beecham, Toscanini, Koussevitzky, Bernstein and indeed Barbirolli (any of four versions) to Davis and Vänskä.

The precision of Elder’s Pohjola’s Daughter, with its carefully tiered dynamics (the low winds/brass and cello opening is beautifully balanced), makes a much stronger impression and so does the hauntingly atmospheric Oceanides, which rises to a powerful climax. In the case of the symphony, the grand denouement is impressive but, in context, unearned: too much has been downplayed en route. It’s an observant performance, well recorded, but, in the digital field, no match for Vänska or Davis on LSO Live.