No shortage of recordings of these timeless treasures of course, but, believe me, these are special performances, captured live in the Royal Festival Hall, 2023 and 2024, in first-class sound and which find the players on their mettle and caught up with these so-familiar pieces as if discovering them for the first time with a conductor they have bonded with (Karina Canellakis is the LPO’s Principal Guest) and built a rapport with her that can best be described as electric, with nothing dowdy, such as routine, to downgrade what are consistently passionate, powerful, expressive and penetrating detail-conscious accounts of dynamism. Canellakis is not an interventionist musician (although a slowing midway through the Finale of the Fifth might be thought to be intervening, yet it’s convincing) but an honest musician with ideas allied to the score and an ability to inspire the players in front of her to be a crack ensemble, which the LPO certainly is, and to encourage characterful responses both in tuttis and solos – the opening bassoon of the ‘Pathétique’ is wonderfully lamenting, for example, as are the dark-hued clarinets to launch the Fifth; woodwinds are beguiling throughout both Symphonies, with brasses at the top of their game in accuracy and tonally. A high level of preparation doesn’t preclude the inspiration of the moment, therefore the stormy development of the Sixth’s first movement is white-hot yet played with precision, and the march of the third movement is exhilarating (if there was clapping at its finish, it has been removed) and one must mention Mark Vines’s effortlessly poetic horn solo in the Fifth’s slow movement, properly songful. Both works end in a way that is unforgettable: the ‘Pathétique’ to incidents of heartbeats, the music clinging on for dear life, whereas the Fifth concludes in unstoppable triumph, really quite thrilling, Fate vanquished. LPO-0137 (2 CDs).

A postscript query: In Symphony Five, violins are antiphonal, with left-positioned basses – ideal – whereas in Six violins are together and basses are to the right. I wonder why. Given the quality of the music-making, this is an aside.