The opening of Beethoven's Fifth, forever later associated with the World War 11 Morse Code signal of V for Victory, could be regarded as hackneyed.

Yet I still remember, as a very young music critic, being reminded by Stephen Gray (then chief executive of the Phil) that someone in the audience would be hearing this arresting motif for the first time.

True, also, that the Phil's approach to Beethoven has changed considerably over the intervening 40 years: it is now much brighter and more concise, free of fussiness and the sort of reverential worthiness which could slow things to a drone, sounding like a dusty needle on an old gramophone.

The late Charles Mackerras's new edition recordings with the RLPO for EMI raised the game.

But now Petrenko's bright as a button approach, which can produce amazing changes of dynamics and volume with a single wave of the baton, has further burnished the ideal.

Moving on, which is the greater of Brahms' two piano concertos?

Most people say the second. I say the first - and there to prove it was the Swiss-German pianist Andreas Haefliger (son of famed late tenor Ernst).

It is, in fact, a symphony with an integral piano part, and spurns the then New German School, headed by Franz Liszt, which all too often put virtuosity ahead of substance.

Here we have it all, from the great braying climaxes of the opening movement, through the nuanced phrasing of of the adagio - with a mysticism never matched again until Shostakovitch's Second Piano Concerto a century later - to the scurrying momentum of the finale.

The only distraction during the latter was the shaving of clarity in the two initial downward keyboard dashes.

Elsewhere, Haefliger knew exactly how to integrate with the orchestra, when to apply muscle and when to demonstrate constraint.