★★★★★

The conductor Sir Neville Marriner, who would have turned 100 next month, was 16 when he was called into the London Symphony Orchestra violins on the outbreak of the Second World War. He played Proms with Henry Wood and, after the War, concerts under Toscanini, Furtwängler, Karajan, Klemperer, Britten and Pierre Monteux, the last of whom said he would make a good conductor. Much of what passes for conducting is imitation and intimation; Marriner learned from the best.

This is a Beethoven set to have close to hand, the one to show friends how a tricky phrase should ideally go

Practical in rehearsal, unassuming on the night, he was underrated by critics who seek grand gestures as their reward for attendance. Working musicians, by contrast, recognised him as a colleague of uncommon sensitivity and unfailing humanity. The present 1980s set of Beethoven symphonies is proof of his rare combination of responsiveness and personal style.

With the self-selecting Academy of St Martin in the Fields, a bunch of musicians disgruntled with the other London orchestras, Marriner practised democracy in action and achieved a neat compromise between big-band bluster and period-instrument theories that pervaded the sector from the 1950s. Listen to his account of the Eroica and you will find a refreshing lack of dogmatic leadership, the meaning of the music emerging organically from the logic of the notes. The fourth symphony is, in my view, unsurpassed on record for its lyrical sway. A lack of bombast in the fifth is positively refreshing. The seventh dances like an old-fashioned ballroom in a nondescript town. If you want maestro razzle, look elsewhere. This is a Beethoven set to have close to hand, the one to show friends how a tricky phrase should ideally go.

If that is not enough to trigger your purchasing finger, the box contains two accounts of the violin concerto, one by Marriner’s close associate and concertmaster Iona Brown and the other by the young Gidon Kremer, who plays the outrageously collaged cadenza by the Soviet dissident Alfred Schnittke – so outrageous that I think this is its first appearance on CD. You will need all ten fingers to count off the sheaf of great concertos that Schnittke references.  This Beethoven gift set is not for Christmas. It is for life.