‘I would almost buy the record just for Fournier,’ wrote Trevor Harvey of Pierre Fournier’s playing on the celebrated 1960 Fricsay recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. Much the same could be said here of the Argentinian instrumentalist Sol Gabetta, who gives a wonderfully lyrical account of the concerto’s all-important cello role. The sounds she draws from her 1759 Guadagnini are as ravishing as they are apt.

I imagine violinist Giuliano Carmignola has a similarly fine instrument. Unfortunately he plays in a drier, spikier ‘period’ style which, whatever its merits, sits uneasily alongside Gabetta’s sound. Fournier and Schneiderhan – and, indeed, Oistrakh and Knushevitsky (Sargent) and Oistrakh and Rostropovich (Karajan) – are more happily matched.

Pianist Dejan Lazić is less retiring than Karajan’s Sviatoslav Richter, who was in a sulk over the tempo for the short but glorious cello-led slow movement. Lazic´ plays with point without quite matching Fricsay’s Géza Anda, who brings real character to the allegedly simplistic piano writing.

The Triple Concerto is a daringly spacious piece: Beethoven opening up vistas he will later revisit in the Violin Concerto and the last two piano concertos. Antonini and his Basle chamber players take a less symphonic view of the work than Fricsay or Karajan (the rhythms of the magisterial polonaise are rather picked at) but their contribution is generally prompt and sympathetic.

Their account of the The Creatures of Prometheus Overture is predictably deft. Less predictable is the degree to which deftness and grace help define the mood of tragic pathos which underpins the Coriolan Overture. The same cannot be said, alas, of Antonini’s lightweight, almost balletic, account of the Egmont Overture. Like many latter-day conductors, he seems uncaring of what it is Beethoven distils here – a great prose drama in which Goethe explores the tragedy of the failed insurrection that inspired the wars of liberation against Spanish rule in the Netherlands during the 1570s. Sadly you need to go back to Klemperer or, better still, Furtwängler to find a conductor on record capable of doing justice to this astonishing work.