Even when confronted with a repertoire full of imposing and magisterial music, conductors still apparently hear non-orchestral repertoire in orchestral terms and want to claim it for themselves. None more famous than Stokowski in Bach, of course, but none of that appears on this superb collection from Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Dimitri Mitropoulos’s epic version of the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV542 is a sure highlight. Whether in the anguished opening, the solemn descent at the centre of the prelude or in the jaunty fugue, Mitropoulos knew how this elevated music might best sound for orchestra and his hunches paid off, both on his own, harder-hitting 1942 recording and this regal, nicely detailed statement under Slatkin.

I was fascinated by Sir Henry Wood’s ‘Suite No 6 for Full Orchestra’ (No 5 is for strings, apparently), especially the quietly rippling version of the C sharp minor Prelude from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier that opens it. The central sequence unexpectedly includes a warm but solemn Adagio from Bach’s Capriccio, whereas more predictably the finale calls on the E major violin Partita’s Prelude. More primary-coloured than Mitropoulos, less lavish than Stoky, Wood’s aromatic Bach should henceforth enter the repertory’s sidelines.

The programme opens with good old BWV565 of Fantasia fame. And while Stanislaw Skrowaczewski’s orchestration levels with Stokowski’s (and Wood’s of the same piece), a more strident use of percussion brings it in further into the 20th century.

Then there are the slower pieces, mostly chorales and chorale preludes, plush and heavily draped in the case of Eugene Ormandy, Sir John Barbirolli, and Walter Damrosch (a little overbearing in A Mighty Fortress is our God). I’m not too sure about Otto Klemperer’s ‘Bist du bei mir’ which seems keen on a Schoenbergian route but doesn’t quite get that far, or Malcolm Sargent’s sugar-coated Air. Erich Leinsdorf gets the balance about right for Herzlich tut mich verlangen but in any case everything here is worth sampling at least once, and most of it more often than that. It’s a real treat and the sound is excellent. Need I say more?