The intention of these ‘Great Conductors’ sets – to include a ‘representative and comprehensive variety of material’ – is admirable, but in the case of the Munch set, problematic. Unlike Monteux, Munch didn’t always sound fully engaged in the Austro-German repertory, and this 1958 Beethoven Ninth Symphony might have gone down a storm as a concert hall ‘event’, but you seldom get the impression he has really thought about the piece.

Take the first movement, a lively and forceful ma non troppo, but there’s very little happening (it’s streamlined, dynamically and texturally). While the inner movements have their moments, Munch’s ambitions for the finale don’t seem to include much beyond encouraging animal exuberance. Which he does (by the shed-load). Sorry to be so negative – as a long-term admirer, it grieves me to be writing the kind of stuff that, a few decades ago, I used to read in Gramophone.

Sadly, the 1966 Bizet Symphony is another example of Munch at less than his best, tempi relatively safe and the French Radio Orchestra’s strings (over-bright and studio-bound) sounding more than ideally bulky for the piece. All rather strenuous next to his more poised and pointed 1963 recording with the Royal Philharmonic.

But – and this is definitely a positive ‘but’ – if you ever harboured thoughts about French orchestras half a century ago not being able to cut the mustard when it came to virtuoso display, you need to hear this 1948 Paris Conservatoire Berlioz Le corsaire. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that life is incomplete until acquaintance is made with Munch conducting Le corsaire – completely dazzling and dizzying; this Paris account explores less than his later Boston one and is in mono (with traces of distortion on the brass), but here is all the care over the finer points – articulation, balance, phrasing – that seems absent from his Beethoven 9.

That care is present for everything else in this set – the daring and the deft touch in the Saint-Saëns transforming silver into gold, excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet leaving you wanting more (the ‘Dance of the Knights’ a touch formal, but perhaps appropriately so), and by far the most valuable inclusion here, Martinu’s Sixth Symphony, recorded in 1956 just months after Ancerl’s famous Supraphon disc.

Martinu wrote the piece for Munch and the Bostonians, and if Ancerl had been blessed with the kind of recorded sound Munch has here, honours might be more evenly divided. As it is, his moderately informative mono is no match for Munch’s vivid stereo. More importantly, listening to this is to wonder whether Martin<= wrote what he did because he knew that, on a good day, only Munch and Boston could bring it off. This was a good day, the music unusually fraught with detonations and anguish. Listen to the excitement Munch reserves for the finale’s last burst of energy – here a worrying moment of significance, with others, so often, just another wind-up. No one can properly evaluate Martinu’s Sixth until they’ve heard this recording.

Nothing quite as spellbinding in Monteux’s set, though plenty that is special. His 1960 Beethoven Second with the NDR Orchestra is – like almost everything here – poised, springy, fresh, superbly balanced, and marginally more lively and dynamic than his contemporary LSO account, if less openly recorded. The NDR’s cellos in the 1964 Tristan Prelude and Liebestod are not the most alluring, but who cares; this is a tantalising glimpse of what Monteux’s Wagner was like – a glimpse being all the record companies managed to catch of a particular passion of his. The playing here, to a degree, is ‘chamber-like’ (the scale, too), in other words, superbly contoured and properly reactive, the pulse forever changing. Astonishing how Monteux is always teaching you new ways of listening.

The only mono recording in this set is the live Hindemith Mathis der Maler Symphony from Copenhagen – a pity, as we don’t have the benefit, heard everywhere else in the set, of Monteux’s antiphonally divided first and second violins. Neither, on this occasion, did he have an orchestra good enough to realise his vision of the piece (which includes a very challenging speed as St Anthony, in the finale, rushes towards those final brass ‘Alleluias’). Overall, it’s not quite as illuminating – or competitive – as I had hoped.

The Boston Debussy Nocturnes should be, more than it is. Initially, for a 1955 recording, this may strike you something of a miracle, but it is not to last. As in the recording’s previous outing in RCA’s Monteux Edition (9/94), dynamic compression robs much of ‘Fêtes’ and the central climax in ‘Sirènes’ of power. The balances in ‘Sirènes’ are occasionally peculiar (moments where the chorus seems closer than the orchestra), and the last bars sound tacked on from a different take with higher level. But when it’s good, it’s wonderful – ‘Nuages’ especially. Was there any conductor who knew more about the variety of expressive colour possible from strings?

Or about the dance? The 50-minute selection from a 1957 Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty was among the first recordings he made with the LSO – his appointment as their principal conductor was some four years in the future – but the sheer élan and lightness of touch belong to another world. No striving for the epic here. Monteux fairly breezes through the numbers, but never insensitively (with what style he manages his two different tempi for the Act 1 Waltz!), and if his delightfully animated ‘Bluebird’ doesn’t raise a smile, you’re a lost cause. Essential Monteux – one to cherish.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea what occasion was being celebrated with the rehearsal rendition of the Marseillaise at the end, but it, and Monteux’s thank you afterwards, are a very fitting way to close the musical offerings.