many of barbirolli's pre-war recordings for hmv were of concertos. his reputation as an accompanist tended to obscure his talents as a symphonic conductor, and later, his detractors in new york "damned him with faint praise by exalting his powers as an accompanist and then implying that that was where it all stopped." barbirolli became very sensitive on this point, and for many years after the war he was reluctant to accompany anyone in the recording studio. among his early hmv records are works, mainly concertos, by brahms, bruch, chopin, dvořák, glazunov, mendelssohn, mozart, schumann, sibelius, tchaikovsky and vieuxtemps. from the 1990s onwards, archive recordings of barbirolli's early concerts in new york have been issued on cd. kennedy wrote in 2004 that they "prove that the orchestra played superbly for him and that the criticism of him was largely unjustified." recordings from this period include symphonies by beethoven, mendelssohn, mozart, schubert, schumann, sibelius and tchaikovsky, and other orchestral music by berlioz, debussy, menotti, purcell, ravel, respighi, and rimsky-korsakov.