Warner Music Original Jackets - Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 'Eroica', CD Classic

'If this isn't great interpretation, I don't know what is,' wrote Gramophone's reviewer in 1968, when this recording was first released, 'I have no hesitation in saying that I think it the greatest performance I have yet heard on record.' John Barbirolli, an intense and inspired interpreter of Beethoven's music, had been conducting the Eroica for many years, but the symphony acquired a special significance for him in the final years of his life. 'Strange how the Eroica exhausts me these days,' he wrote in 1966. 'It may well be because I am really beginning to plumb its depths.'