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When he was 11 and realized that he could buy classical records in his local, pop-oriented HMV, he picked out a copy of the Sinfonia of London’s “English Music for Strings,” conducted by John Barbirolli.

It’s a sound and feeling that he heard in Barbirolli’s strings, and that he brings to the Sinfonia of London today: strong, immediate and indisputable.

Boult’s readings have too stiff an upper lip for me, though their authority is unmistakable; others, from Serge Koussevitzky’s muscular account to the soaring grandeur of John Barbirolli’s, the radiant patience of André Previn’s to the touching honesty of the composer’s own, give more of a sense of the stakes involved.

And perhaps nobody since Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like Wilson; Schreker’s “Intermezzo” here has a sheen to it that is intensely delicate one minute and impossibly sumptuous the next.

Fitfully in use since the 1950s, it was the title of the ensemble that played on John Barbirolli’s 1963 record of string music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams.