Five very different conductors on four very different DVDs. That featuring Ancerl and Scherchen in rehearsal derives from two CBC broadcasts in the late 1960s. Ancerl puts the Toronto players through their paces in Vltava. Even (or, perhaps, especially) when one thinks one is thoroughly familiar with an old warhorse, to experience it being prepared so patiently and gracefully by a man who has the score in his veins is revelatory. After this, I shall never again take hearing an orchestral pot-boiler for granted.

Bohemian-born Ancerl was assistant to Hermann Scherchen in Germany from 1929 to 1931. Filmed in the last year of the latter’s life, the second section of the DVD offers a rare glimpse of the grumpy, tight-lipped maestro rehearsing his own orchestration of The Art of Fugue. Looking like a cross between Toscanini and the late Pope, the constantly exasperated Scherchen inspires an atmosphere of such awkwardness and tension you wonder how anyone can play their instruments, let alone make music. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ are not in his vocabulary. And yet he manages to elicit some memorable playing, such as the second fugue which, he insists, should sound‘like whispering voices in a night of sorrow’. VAI, I might add, seems at last to be taking a little more trouble over presentation.

‘God knows I was never an easy-going conductor,’ admits the elderly Günter Wand in the last interview before his death in 2002, another uncompromising and unsmiling baton-waver who achieved miraculous results. The first quarter of this DVD is a stunningly dull study of his life (in German with subtitles): Teutonic plodding at its finest. The real interest is in the in-depth interview that follows, given in November 2001 to his biographer Wolfgang Seifert. Severe and resigned in its delivery, this is the conductor’s thought-provoking final will and testament with its lofty aims and musical philosophy.

The antithesis of the old school of conducting is Claudio Abbado. ‘He doesn’t seem to have an ego,’ says one young player. ‘People play better for him as a result,’ observes conductor Daniel Harding who marvels at how such laid-back, elegant body language can simultaneously produce such tension in the music and freedom in the players. This film portrait, though, is laced with an irritating streak of pretentiousness and is hagiographic to a degree. Has this man no faults? Can he do nothing wrong? Beyond a reference to his cancer, his private life is off limits. For all his apparent openness, Abbado is a closed book and, by the end of the film, the man remains an enigma.

Rafael Kubelík was another collaborator-and-colleague conductor. The most revealing and satisfying of these four DVDs – and which bears repeated viewing – is Reiner Moritz’s portrait of this great (in all senses; Kubelík stood 6’4”) man and musician. The research, use of stills and archive footage (including glimpses of his father, Jan, the famous violinist), the contributions from his wife Elsie (née Morrison, that enchanting soprano whom he married in 1963), his articulate and spectacularly hirsute son Martin, and Daniel Barenboim, the trenchant interviews with the conductor himself and the many music sequences are all handled in an exemplary fashion.

Kubelík had a huge capacity for alcohol. He arrived at Barenboim’s apartment one night after a concert feeling unwell. Gasping for breath, he asked Barenboim’s mother if there was anything to drink. ‘Yes, of course,’ she answered, ‘would you like some water?’ ‘Only if you also have some soap,’ replied Kubelík. Who could fail to warm to such a man?