Stanford: "Requiem": NSO/Adrian Leaper (Marco Polo) Dial-a-track code: 1641

David Brown's sleeve note for Stanford's Requiem of 1896 suggests that the piece's extended Dies irae is "one of the pinnacles of Victorian music". There's a lassitude in this new performance, however, which makes this seem a daring claim. Stanford's large memorial to the painter Lord Leighton observes Victorian proprieties and is reserved in invention, but still fills itself out to appropriate length for a great and solemn statement.

The singing, both solo and choral, is uneven and, in concentrating on a mood of resignation, conductor Adrian Leaper errs on the side of caution and understatement. Excerpts from The Veiled Prophet Of Khorassan under Colman Pearce are more effectively done.

Mendelssohn: "String Symphonies 2, 3, 5,11 and 13" (Teldec) Dial-a-track code: 1751

Like Stanford, the astonishingly-gifted young Mendelssohn, who wrote his String Symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14, wears the traces of his models quite openly. But the teenage German had a boyish brio not readily associated with the output of the Dublin-born pillar of the British musical establishment. Concerto Koln, playing on period instruments, respond to the joie de vivre with bracing sharpness.

They offer brisk, snappy playing in the fast movements and there's a delicate huskiness of tone which adds to the appeal of the slow ones. Enjoyable, too, is the springy gait of the percussion-accompanied Swiss Song Scherzo of No. 11. A cheering collection.

Sviatoslav Richter plays Prokofiev. (DG mid-price) Dial-a-track code: 1861

These recordings of Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto and Eighth Sonata date from the early years of Richter's fame in the West, around 1960. He handles the treacherously manic, high-wire dance of the concerto with apparently limitless reserves of pianistic insouciance. And to the war-time sonata, which includes some of the composer's most ruminative piano writing, he brings a particularly haunting, timeless beauty.

DG's original-image bit-processing of these wonderful performances offers a high-level transfer in which the frequency balances have been tinkered with to produce lots of added brightness and impact. Like haute cuisine with flavour enhancer, the improvement is no improvement at all.