Horse And Woman And Dog Aka Uma to Onna to Inu (1990) Hisayasu Satô, Kanako Kishi, Kazuhiro Sano, Yuri Sasaki

The setting is the Riviera in autumn. A retired English businessman has just been through heart surgery but it has, apparently, done little to relieve his constant pain or improve his long-term survival prospects. During his recuperation Caroline, his adult daughter, comes from Paris to be with him and her mother, Miche, and she and her father begin to communicate as adults for the first time.

This disc offers something quite hard to get these days - Beethoven and Schubert played for their own sake under a conductor who can and does wield from the rostrum every bit of the immense authority of the best years of his cello-playing when even the intervals between the notes seemed to have been imaginatively recreated, and the phrasing presented with nothing less than perfect sensitivity and dignity, and without any desire to make points or impress by virtuoso polish. Of course his approach is of his time. But the Marlboro audience was very lucky, and so is anyone who now listens to this with an open mind. This is a great musician conducting folk who in the act of performance he treats as equals.

What is so good about Sir Roger's performances are that they are alive, vibrant, full of colour, devoid of clichés, utterly musical, coherent and convincing. Like Thomson he has a reliable ear for balance and texture and an instinctive ability to gauge the correct and most effective tempi.