You can find sound records of the same Debussy items from a month later in identically cultivated performances as part of EMI’s edition. When reviewing them (2/98), Rob Cowan hit upon an underlying problem with the Celibidache aesthetic; that it exists at all. Open ears will not easily tire of the bar-to-bar revelations of impeccably rehearsed texture and sonority, even on repetition, but inquisitive minds may soon find their curiosity sated by the sheer bloody-minded consistency of the Celibidache treatment, exemplified by a 15-minute Prélude à L’après-midi that spurns anything so vulgar as lassitude for a ballet of such distanced fastidiousness that even a faun might be too crudely mortal an intruder on the scene (much the same goes, in more alienated fashion, for a 20-minute Boléro). I thought I had heard him do Alborada del gracioso before; I hadn’t, but what else was I to expect? I might as well have sat at the piano and played the middle section at half-speed myself. You’re never likely to hear the viola solo in “Par les rues et les chemins” of Ibéria, or its associated cross-rhythms, with greater or more disconcerting clarity, to say nothing of the clouds of perfume floating with almost imperceptible movement across the central nocturne. But while Celi knows how to blend clarinets into trumpets, it should be said that so did Karajan and Monteux.

The saturated, grainy, made-for-TV picture, the inconvenient tracking (Ibéria is not divided by movement, Rhapsodie espagnole is) and the usual pseudy guff that passes for booklet-notes in Celi releases will not deter the enthusiast, but the uninitiated are perhaps better off hearing rather than seeing what all the fuss is about.