You never know when it's going to hit you, and it just hit me again. I'm referring to Classical Music, which a few hours ago now, before Friends and Will and Grace and Scrubs and Have I Got News For You and all the other Friday night amusement on British TV now, just reached his vast fist out of the musical wallpaper and gripped me by the throat.

I put on the Brahms First Piano Concerto and it duly thundered away for its allotted forty five minutes, in a way that impinged upon me hardly at all. Very nice. So then put I put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, and half way through the first movement I went for a piss, and it occurred to me when I was on my way there that it was on rather loud, and that it might be disturbing the neighbours. The fact that it hadn't been disturbing me at all until I noticed how loud it was when I was in the next room isn't logical. But there it is, that's how it was. So anyway, I paused it, switched off the loudspeakers, put on my headphones, connected up my headphone, and resumed it. Bloody hell, it was fabulous. It was one of, I now realise, my favourite recordings of this much recorded work, the one done in 1964 by Geza Anda with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic at the height of their combined powers.

It may have helped that the sound was switched up to something a bit louder than my headphones could really handle. This served as a satisfactory substitute for the now obsolete idea that the musicians ought to be struggling with music which is beyond their power to perform, which I am sure used to be an intrinsic part of the appeal of pieces like this. Will the soloist hit all the notes? Will he remember it all? Will the horns fluff their big moment? Will they all manage to stay together? Of course you know the answer to all such questions with a CD, which means that this sense of possible catastrophe just round every corner has to be recreated by other means, and my headphones (£9.99 in the market about ten years ago) do that job splendidly.

Geza Anda was Hungarian, I believe, and made another favourite recording of mine from the days of LPs, in the form of the Bartok piano concertos with fellow Hungarian Ferenc Fricsay, and his Hungarianness surely helps for this Brahms piece also, which is likewise full of gypsy cross-rhythms and such like. And the Karajan accompaniment is absolutely fabulous, wonderfully lush and vigorous and forceful and sonorous. This Brahms recording, unlike the Bartok of which much has been made ever since they first did it, is one of those lesser recorded beings deemed not worthy of having photographs of any of the musicians on the front of it, or even of the composer. No, it merely has some old houses on it, which puts it only one up from a box of chocolates or a puzzle. But second rate it absolutely is not. It's terrific.

Karajan is terribly unfashionable these days, the basic complaint being that he was just too good. The music he made was too beautiful. He was, you might say, the opposite of my headphones. But in this Brahms he uses his extreme musical excellence to take the music to its outer limits, rather than to make it sound merely comfortable. And anyway, what's wrong with perfection I'd like to know. Not all music makes its impact by sounding impossible to play. Lots of it is just beautiful.

Or then again, maybe it was just me, and maybe I had just been storing up inside myself the readiness to pay some serious attention to some music, and this just happened to be it.

I've been googling to try to find a link to this recording, but all I got was huge lists which it was buried in the middle of. But I was reminded in my googlings that Anda made another recording of this same piece, also with the Berlin Phil, but this time with Fricsay conducting. Yes, the very same accompanist as in the famous Bartok. This is considered better than the Karajan one, because Fricsay (having made far fewer recordings) is considered as brilliant and "musical" as Karajan was bland and power hungry. And guess what, I have that one also. I'd forgotten about it. I shall try that soon as well, also with the headphones, and hear how it compares.