Memorable performances of Beethoven’s superb Egmont Overture are rarer than one might imagine but this Thielemann performance is exceptional, as remarkable in its way as the recording of the Coriolan Overture which Carlos Kleiber filmed in Munich in 1996 with a neighbouring Bavarian ensemble. Thielemann tries no tricks with the music. It is a performance which marries glowing old-world sound with an enviable ease and accuracy of articulation and great expressive power. As Furtwängler was wont to do, Thielemann prolongs the general pause after Egmont’s execution (the falling fifth on the violins), characterising death by what is in effect a highly charged silence.

The Brahms is even more unashamedly “old school”, painted from a full, dark palette of sound colours, richly applied and finely blended after the manner of the great colourists of the past: Mengelberg, Stokowski, Celibidache. There are those who like to compare Thielemann to Karajan. This is misleading. His reading of the Brahms C minor is cut from the same cloth as Karajan’s – or, to widen the range of reference, Sanderling’s in his magnificent 1971 Dresden set – but the overall effect is mellower and softer-grained. Sanderling’s performance, and the epic 1987 Karajan, are sterner, loftier, and, since they are less given to moments of dreamlike stasis at points of transition, fierier. Yet what Thielemann misses in trenchancy and leonine splendour he more than makes up for in the often daringly expressive quality of the music-making. In lesser hands, such expressiveness might seem self-indulgent but that is hardly the case here, such is Thielemann’s unassailable command of both form and orchestra. The recording is superb.