No performance of Brahms’s Second Symphony can be fairly accused of being too beautiful or too robust, certainly not this one which in terms of the sheer splendour of orchestral sound is both beautiful and robust. (It is pretty exciting, too. Mengelberg does not hang about.) For the tragic Fourth Symphony, additional virtues are needed and here it is possible to think that an expert presentation of the musical facts is all Mengelberg is willing to offer us.

What is remarkable about this latest reissue is the advances there have been in coping with the archive material itself. Telefunken had some of the best technology in Europe in the 1930s, albeit in the hands of technicians who were less than scrupulous in their manipulation of recording levels. Alas, during the war many of the metal masters were lost, damaged or simply badly stored. The last time Teldec put out these performances on CD, the sound was rough and uneven (the more closely miked Fourth Symphony sounded as if it was being played from a shellac disc with a huge lump of fluff on the stylus).

For whatever reason, that is all now a thing of the past. Naxos recently produced first-rate transfers of these same performances taken from mint condition shellac pressings but Bryan Crimp’s new Teldec transfers are, if anything, even warmer and more vivid. A certain amount of residual surface noise persists in both sets of transfers but the ear soon adjusts – drawn to the stunning interplay of orchestral sonority and the matchless Concertgebouw acoustic which the Telefunken engineers really knew and understood. Cleaned up, this is a Rembrandt among Brahms Seconds. The Rijksmuseum should be sent a copy forthwith.