These are from 1962 (Brahms) and 1969 (Dvorak, with the Czech orchestra). George Szell’s Dvorak is always great, and there’s plenty of vitality in his Brahms. The Czech orchestra with Szell is a winning combination, though he manages to make the Cleveland Orchestra sound utterly Czech in his two recordings of the Dvorak with them. In fact, those recordings are so good that if you have either you need not bother with this one. Here the sound is too close-up; even a little irritating. That applies to both symphonies. There is no warmth at all.

And I don’t like the Lucerne clarinet and flute soloists. Their sound is hard and brittle. So this is for people who can’t get the Cleveland recordings.

This is listed as Volume 3, but we are not sure what happened to Volume 2. Volume 1 was Peer Gynt and such, and we reviewed it very enthusiastically (Sept/Oct 2011).

I am less enthusiastic about this installment. After all, Beecham recorded the Old Norwegian Romance and In Autumn and it’s hard to beat Beecham at anything or even match him. And Arthur Fiedler did a glorious recording of the Lyric Suite that makes this one sound earnest and plodding.

Well, one may feel that this young conductor takes the music more seriously. It’s heritage to him, after all. But heaviness and ploddingness (is that a word?) are the result. The sound is, as usual with Audite and this orchestra, quite beautiful. But sweetness and flow seem in small supply.

This is the second volume in a three-disc project to record the six organ symphonies of Louis Vierne (1870-1937). Hans-Eberhard Ross, since 1991 choirmaster of the deanery of St Martin in Memmingen (Bavaria), plays the four-manual 1998 Goll organ there.

At the beginning of his interpreter’s notes in the booklet Ross quotes Vierne to the effect that he had in mind the instrument and ambience of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris for his organ compositions. Vierne was organist there from 1900 until he died. A few lines later, Ross is highly critical of recordings of Vierne on opulent Cavaille-Coll instruments in cathedrals with too much reverberation. Even if this contradicts the composer’s stated ideal, Ross does have a point. In Marie-Claire Alain’s 1989 recording of the first four Vierne symphonies at the Cavaille-Coll organ at St Stephen’s Abbey in Caen (Erato), to name but one example, a good deal of contrapuntal detail is inaudible in the overwhelming cloud of reverberation. What good is compositional detail if the listener can’t hear it? Ross’s mission is to rectify this in the present series of recordings, and not everyone will agree on whether he has managed that.

Donald Metz reviewed the first volume of this series (Audite 92674; March/April 2013) and remarked on Ross’s more clinical approach to the music in comparison with other recordings. Describing the present performances as clinical would be too severe. Ross achieves his aim of making nearly every detail of the music audible, and while his performances may not be quite heart-on-sleeve, I find them far from dispassionate or insensitive. The organ itself combines darkness with clarity in a room with a four-second reverberation that imparts warmth without obscuring the part writing. The instrument may not have the passionate character of Cavaille-Coll at his best, but it is not worlds removed from it. Ross also takes a somewhat free approach to registration in the interest of clarity, but generally reproduces the composer’s intended tone colors.

The Amadeus Quartet recorded this Beethoven cycle in RIAS broadcasts in the 1950s and 60s, at the peak of their long career. While modern in most respects the four voices are more distinct than is now the fashion; leader Norbert Brainin is particularly prominent. There is also more interpretation, Beethoven being made to sigh, skip, and shout with untrammeled abandon as if the scores were being interpreted biographically, as was often the case in earlier times. This is all to the good if you prefer warmly emotional performances. The recorded sound is also warm and appealing.

Here is a mite to add to the already large Stern discography: broadcast recordings from the Lucerne festivals of 1956 and 1958. The violinist is in fine form, making it all sound easy which is a problem for people who believe that Tchaikovsky should sound passionate and Bartok edgy. Perhaps critics of a historicist bent should not write about such things; to us it sounds like Stern imitating Milstein imitating Heifetz. Imitation is by no means a bad thing, at least when one can discern a progress of tradition or refinement; but if there is development here it seems at best but a progress of blandness. To be sure, here is technical brilliance. But while Heifetz can still be thrilling in his arch coolness, Stern’s way with the music seems but an echo of an echo.

It was inevitable that music would play no small part in the regeneration of Germany following the destruction of the Nazi empire. Amid the wreck and the rubble, the anguish and the finger-pointing, the music never stopped: as before, it lent ambiguous expression to a plenitude of conflicting sentiments and aspirations. Berlin’s musical institutions, no less than the divided city’s material infrastructure, were in immediate need of reconstruction. With Furtwangler, the musical moral compass, temporarily sidelined, much of the task of rebuilding fell to his place-holder at the Philharmonic, Sergiu Celibidache (1912-96), who was principal conductor from 1945 to 1952.

Much has been made of Celibidache’s peculiarities – his Buddhism and refusal to make studio recordings – but what one hears in this massive retrospective of his postwar work with the Philharmonic and Berlin Radio Symphony is in one important respect almost conventional: his allegiance to the Nikisch approach to music-making, the grand style that for two generations had been the dominant mode in Europe and America. It was about to go out of fashion – and Celibidache’s nascent career with it – but in these remarkable post-war recordings, as with Furtwangler’s, it achieved an apogee.

The Nikisch way was less a style than a principle. Its chief exponents all had their own individual style, but the principle was ever to seek out and heighten the dramatic elements in a composition. Celibidache, comparatively new to conducting, did not in 1945 have much of a personal style; and the performances here might be easily mistaken for Furtwangler, Walter, or Beecham (how glorious is that?). They are marked by strong contrasts of tempo, timbre, and volume and not a little freedom taken with shaping melodic lines.

Listening to this long parade of emotive performances is exhausting enough to demonstrate Celibidache’s point about the unnatural quality of recordings, which drain the contextual and dramatic elements from musical drama. Such potent medicine as this is best taken in small doses. But we can report that, while all is compelling, Celibidache is most comfortable and effective in German repertoire – and outside the realm of the familiar he can be odd – but still compelling.

Recall the circumstances under which these broadcast performances were made: most of the music had not been performed in Germany for two decades, if at all. It was new to the conductor, new to the musicians, new to the audiences. O brave new post-war world! The collection opens with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, given a zest implicitly expressing the joy of music without limits. French and Russian works are abundantly represented in dramatic if strikingly unidiomatic interpretations. Here are long-forbidden decadent Jewish moderns: Milhaud, Copland, David Diamond. Appalachian Spring in Berlin! And Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, more appropriate to the occasion. No Wagner.

The electrical excitement of the original broadcasts, the experience of all these musical novelties, reverberates across the decades and is given a strong boost by the conductor’s wayward way with a score. But most memorable for this listener is a small, familiar item tucked away in the middle: the most perfectly insouciant, most perfectly executed Till Eulenspiegel I have ever heard – which is saying a lot. That, like the whopping explosion in the Haydn Surprise Symphony, gets to the essence of the Nikisch way of doing things. This mode was not to last, and the joyful historical moment here captured would dissipate amid the dull proprieties of the Karajan regime. There must have been a little of Till Eulenspiegel mixed up in Celibidache’s other-worldly character: though pushed from the throne he would not go away, and decades later was still reminding concert-goers who cared that there had been a time when giant-conductors stalked the earth – wayward, […]

Powerful performances: the Manderling Quartet’s Op. 44, No. 3, gives the lie to the judgment that Mendelssohn’s middle quartets represent a step backward.

The Amadeus inject into the slinky 6/8 meter a sudden urgency or impetuosity that jars us into complete attention. If Beethoven had provided the model in his E Minor Quartet, Schubert has taken his own path, a tumultuous and often blistering course, as the Amadeus realization insists most forcefully.

Eivind Aadland’s superlative third volume of orchestral Grieg for Audite brings performances of astonishing poise, intrepid character and enormous conviction, stunningly well captured by the WDR microphones and guaranteed to make you fall in love all over again with this entrancing, criminally underrated repertoire. It’s a joyous treat and no mistake!

Right from the off, things augur well. The Spring Symphony’s opening Andante un poco maestoso is also, usefully, con moto, which means a refreshing lack of portentousness. A marked relaxation of tempo before the excited acceleration into the fast main body of the movement accentuates the dramatic effect of Schumann’s writing. Holliger is one of those musicians who hears what he conducts from the inside, a crucial virtue in Schumann and a neat way to disqualify curmudgeonly commentators who wrongly accuse Schumann of ineptitude in orchestration. Nonsense, I say – as this disc proves. The Larghetto expresses itself fluently and without unwarranted indulgence, the Scherzo wears its accents lightly and the finale takes the dance as its starting point.

Aside from its Faustian opening, the wonderful symphony in three movements that goes by the name of Overture, Scherzo and Finale breathes Mendelssohnian fresh air, even though the Scherzo seems to suggest infant Valkyries. The Finale’s coda blazes triumphantly, which leaves what’s called in this context the Symphony in D minor, in reality the Fourth in its original 1841 incarnation, leaner, lighter and more abrupt than the familiar revision and with some different thematic material. It’s useful to have, though there can be little doubt that Schumann’s later thoughts were his best, and by some considerable distance. Precise playing and fine, detailed sound guarantee a generous pleasure quota. Other excellent Schumann conductors on disc such as Rafael Kubelik (DG), Fabio Luisi (Orfeo), Paavo Järvi (RCA or C Major on DVD), David Zinman (Arte Nova) and Thomas Dausgaard (BIS) remain on hand as viable alternatives; but, as Holliger is en route to a complete cycle, I’d hold on to your shekels, at least for the moment. His may well be the one to go for.