Here are the two remaining items in Cala’s valuable three-volume restoration of all the recordings that Stokowski and the NYPO made for American Columbia during 1947-49. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet can seldom have received more impassioned, pungently characterful advocacy. Beware, however, the departures from the printed score, most notably Stokowski’s pianissimo ending (a notion that also occured to Balakirev, who deemed Tchaikovsky’s fortissimo chords ‘inartistic’).

No such editorial qualms surround this first recording of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony, made in February 1949 just two days before Boult’s famous LSO account. Both remain thrilling documents and feature the composer’s original Scherzo (VW’s revision followed in Janaury 1950). In the second and fourth movements Stokowski adopts a more urgent approach than Boult without any loss of mystery. It’s a blisteringly committed performance, fabulously played, and (one or two patches of surface swish aside) has never sounded better than in this latest transfer, which, like the Tchaikovsky, makes use of the original lacquers housed in Sony’s New York archive.

There’s another first recording from 1949: From the Sacred Harp by Thomas Jefferson Scott (1912-61). This nostalgic work was originally issued on a rare ‘V-Disc’ produced for US servicemen based overseas. It is flanked by two further Carnegie Hall broadcasts from the same year: a formidably sleek and dynamic Mozart Haffner Symphony, and a breezy ‘Polka and Fugue’ from Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper (again, very much a case of ‘ed Stokowski’, with the original key of B transposed down a major third to G!).

Acolytes will have a field-day here, and anyone who hasn’t yet heard Stokowski’s VW6 is in for a treat.