István Kertész was 36 and had recently succeeded Pierre Monteux as principal conductor of the LSO when this recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was made in Kingsway Hall in October 1965. A brisk but by no means unfeeling performance, it sounded well then and sounds well now. Unfortunately, it faced formidable competition from an equally brisk but altogether more characterful and ‘rooted’ performance recorded in the same hall two years earlier by Klemperer and the Philharmonia (EMI 5/65, due for reissue next spring).

Reviewing the Kertész in these columns, Deryck Cooke liked the general thrust of the performance but found that at important moments in the structure the reading ‘just fails to reach the heights because of an almost metronomic inflexibility in the beat’. He cited approaches to two tutti passages in the first movement, though I found Kertész’s inflexibility at points of slow transition even more worrisome. The gloriously modulating chorale beginning at fig K of the first movement (8'23") is a case in point. It sounds grand but it is not really very interesting musically. Klemperer’s climaxes are points of arrival, his transitions journeys into distant realms. Here the music simply sits and looks at you.

Kertész lasted a relatively short time with the LSO and met an untimely death in a swimming accident in Israel in 1973. He was not, I think, a conductor of the front rank. He came to prominence in the high noon of the stereo age at a time when spectacular engineering and fine orchestral playing often made emergent talent seem better than it was. I see in my notes the phrase ‘Decca balances the orchestra, Klemperer balances the music’. That more or less sums it up.

I guess the monomaniacal Evgeni Svetlanov was doing his own balancing in this brazenly vivid 1981 Moscow Bruckner Eighth which continues to turn up like the proverbial bad penny. Keenly recorded in a large, reverberant acoustic, the performance turns the symphony into the musical equivalent of a military parade, a fact echoed by the new CD cover which shows a cheering worker, fist clenched, waving a red flag.

More interesting by far is a live 1946 Bruno Walter recording of the Ninth Symphony, a new addition to the catalogue. You could argue that the high point of the release is Mark W Kluge’s booklet-essay, in particular the 3000-word envoi ‘Walter and Bruckner’s Ninth’. As Kluge reveals, there are now five extant off-air Walter recordings, in addition to the commercial recording he made in Los Angeles in 1959 (CBS, 6/61, currently available only as part of Sony Classical’s nine-CD Bruno Walter Edition).

The studio recording is something of a gramophone classic, though like all late Walter recordings it has not escaped censure. Walter was 83 and, as Kluge points out, was sufficiently frail to require a local recording location. This accommodated only 65 players, though I would be inclined to agree with producer John McClure who argued that they sound just fine in this particular acoustic. Nor do I buy the idea that Walter’s music-making was seriously compromised after his 1957 heart attack. He had profound and wonderful things to say about the Ninth and remained very much in control of what he was doing.

The 1946 New York performance is sonically bigger but at the same time quicker and, in places, rhythmically more exigent than the later studio version. More dramatic than reflective, the performance works especially well in the first movement were a sense of impending catastrophe comes powerfully across. A (for Walter) surprisingly quick account of the Scherzo reinforces this mood, though the troublesome pizzicati are not especially well handled by the New York strings.

Alas, the great concluding Adagio, so effectively conducted and recorded in the studio version, comes off less well, compromised by sound which suffers increasingly from residual distortion. (At the very end, it is difficult to know whether the horns are waving or drowning.) Derived from a set of 16-inch long-playing transcription discs made for the Armed Forces Radio Service, the recording itself is immediate to the point of being aggressive but with perspectives which are reassuringly deep and open.

This is a fascinating and superbly documented release but it is no substitute for the later studio version.