As early as his 1959 Vienna Philharmonic recording, Solti treated Beethoven’s Eroica as a broad-based epic, the first movement measured and expressive in the Bruno Walter style, the Funeral March slow of gait and solemn of visage. As the years passed, the two final movements were drawn into the concept making for a reading that was powerful, concentrated, entire unto itself. Given Solti’s measured tempo, his reading of the first movement works better without the exposition repeat (a repeat about which Beethoven himself had doubts), which is what we have here in this physically imposing 1968 London performance. (In Solti’s 1972 Chicago recording, part of a set of the Nine where “completeness” was a selling-point, the repeat was included.) The text is unusually good for the time with no spurious extension of the trumpet line in the first movement coda.

The Wagner extracts are taken from a 1963 Prom given by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House of which Solti had recently become music director. The playing in Siegfried’s Rhine Journey is terrific, as is the superbly engineered Royal Albert Hall recording with its fine detailing and wide-ranging perspectives. What is something of a triumph for Solti is less so for Nilsson who is not at her best. Though received with acclaim, her out-of-sorts Liebestod isn’t a patch on the incandescent account she and Böhm conjure up at the end of the complete 1966 Bayreuth Tristan (DG, 1/67R).