The British conductor Reginald Goodall is rightly known and celebrated for his operatic conducting. A quick glance at the review archives at Fanfare magazine indicates no less than 28 reviews, all of them for operas, of which more than half were written by Wagner.

This week's release therefore will come as something of a pleasant surprise. For here we have Reginald Goodall conducting orchestral music with the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden - and not all of it standard repertoire for anyone, let alone Goodall - all in fine sound from the conductor's own tape reel.

This concert, recorded and then broadcast three days later by the BBC in 1961, opens with music by Dukas - the overture Polyeucte - who has previously only featured on a single one of Pristine's 955 album releases. It's followed by Messiaen's L'Ascension,   and the composer thus makes his Pristine debut. Finally we have Schumann's Fourth Symphony, a work which is of course to be found in a number of incarnations in our catalogue.

These two recordings capture Wilhelm Furtwängler at his peak in 1951 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in live performances of Bruckner's Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7.

Taken from concert recordings made in Munich and Cairo both have been elevated from their position in the second tier of Furtwängler classics thanks to their previously inferior sound quality, something which has been substantially improved in these brand new Pristine Ambient Stereo XR remasters and now must surely place them alongside his finest work.