Van Beinum became familiar to London audiences in the late 1940s, especially through his association with the LPO. He was a likeable man, and a likeable conductor, closer in style to Weingartner or Boult in his level, classical approach than to Furtwängler or to Mengelberg. As Mengelberg’s successor at the Concertgebouw, perhaps he needed to shake off the older man’s flamboyance, autocracy and extremes of interpretation, and perhaps distance himself from the débâcle of Mengelberg’s association with the Nazis occupying Holland during the war. He was a prolific recording artist: there have been special collections of his work in several volumes, and here he is now numbered among BBC Legends and Great Conductors of the 20th Century.

The BBC record shows much how he could vary in one and the same concert (at the Festival Hall in November 1958). As Alan Sanders writes in his very informative notes to both these records, there has been a tendency ‘to dismiss his faithful, objective style of music making as being worthy but dull’. Beethoven’s Second Symphony lends support to that. Everything is in place, fair, clear and firm, but there is also a distinct over-emphasis, as if Van Beinum were compensating for some lack of real engagement with the work.

Then, with the Seventh, all his virtues come together in inspired fashion. Tempi are beautifully judged (not every conductor manages to secure a just combination of weight and pace in the Allegretto), the structure of the first movement’s Vivace is taut and powerful, with a superb build-up to the closing bars; the finale has a dynamic energy that springs from the inner nature of the music (in the Second’s finale it seemed imposed from without). This is a performance to set beside that of Klemperer, whom Van Beinum was in fact replacing.

There is again an unexpected contrast between the two symphonies on the second set. Schubert’s Sixth is oddly heavy-handed, with assertive accents and almost nervous emphases in the phrasing, at any rate until relaxation comes with the finale. Yet the performance of Brahms’s Second finds Van Beinum in his element. The opening theme becomes a motto which binds the whole work discreetly but expressively. So the opening Allegro, beautifully played, has a lyrical ease that is at the same time a closely knit structure, while in the Allegretto there is a dancing variety as Brahms plays with the theme, and the finale drives home energetically but never frenetically. It is a conductor in total sympathy with the music, in no need of demonstrating his personal skills.

Of the more virtuosic works, Van Beinum is perhaps happiest with Scheherazade, certainly in his lyrical handling of the third movement. He is certainly more at home with the gentle Romanticism of Nicolai’s Merry Wives Overture than with the frenzies of Don Juan, which, notwithstanding a fine oboe solo in the love scene, comes over rather scrappily. Cockaigne bustles along with cheerful appearances from the street band and tenderness in the nocturnal music.

These are, as with all Van Beinum’s music-making, truthful and well-wrought performances. If he is uneven, it is never through meretriciousness. Perhaps, of these recordings, only Beethoven 7 and Brahms 2 would really qualify him as, in the series’s title, one of the ‘Great Conductors of the 20th Century’. But then greatness is seldom if ever consistent; it is mediocrity that can always be relied upon to be itself.