Klaus Tennstedt’s 1981 Berlin recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony (EMI, 2/83) is no longer available but this superb live account from the same period is ample recompense. More so than the LPO’s live 1989 Royal Festival Hall performance which is entirely surpassed in terms of the drive, imagination and power of Tennstedt’s engagement both with the music and the orchestra. The Berlin Philharmonie recording, expertly remastered by Testament from Berlin-Brandenburg radio tapes, also surpasses its London equivalent in richness, depth and clarity of sound.

The real test of any performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is the finale, which Tennstedt handles with special understanding: generously paced, shrewdly detailed and comprehensively of a piece. Significantly, the first horn is as eloquent in the elegiac 16-bar solo which emerges out of the coda’s hymn-like initiation as he is in the symphony’s celebrated opening. That magical horn line echoes the slow movement’s principal “processional” motif. Tennstedt plays the Andante quasi allegretto broadly, at the kind of lingering pace favoured by Walter, Böhm and Celibidache, rather than swiftly and idiomatically as Klemperer and Kempe do. He also retains one or two details – orchestral “gestures” you might say – from the old Löwe/Schalk edition of the score. This will be familiar territory to Tennstedt followers, who will not be dissuaded from treating the release as archive gold.

The two-record set comes at a special price, since the concerto which preceded the symphony in the Berlin concert is added on a second 30-minute CD. It was two bargain-price LPs of Beethoven’s Third and Fifth piano concertos which in 1968 first propelled the 27-year-old Bruno Leonardo Gelber to prominence. The finale of the youthful B flat Concerto is here lacking in skittishness and subversive wit but there is enough to enjoy in the two earlier movements. The orchestral playing under Tennstedt is stylish and sure-footed.