How I would love to have been in London‚ Birmingham‚ Sheffield or Newcastle during December 1935 when Wilhelm Furtwängler was touring Britain with the Berlin Phil and including Max Reger’s long­breathed ‘The Hermit with the Violin’ (the first of the Böcklin Symphonic Poems) on his programmes. Anyone seeking an entrée into Reger’s musical world could hardly choose better‚ and although Leon Botstein‚ the LPO and violinist Michael Davis aren’t quite as serenely centred as Gerd Albrecht‚ Hans Maile and his Berlin colleagues on the best of the competition‚ they’re still pretty good. Botstein obviously loves the music and Telarc usefully provide photos­in­miniature of all four Böcklin originals so that Reger’s tone poems have at least some sort of visual reference point. Not that you really need them. ‘The Play of the Waves’ is a dusky caprice‚ and ‘The Isle of the Dead’ is more a study of dramatic promontories than the kind of surging narrative conjured by Rachmaninov. Telarc’s recording offers thrilling reportage of the rolling bass drum that underpins the climaxes while the explosive gestures of the closing ‘Bacchanal’ have real ‘edge’. When I spoke with Claudio Abbado recently‚ he also confessed a love of this work‚ and it would be wonderful if he‚ too‚ could bring it in to the studio; but generally speaking Bostein and the LPO do Reger proud. The Romantic Suite opens rather like a cross between Debussy and the Strauss of Tod und Verklärung and has a fantastical valse­scherzo at its centre‚ much as Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances do. Reger’s orchestral mastery is everywhere in evidence‚ and Telarc print translations of Eichendorff’s poems which‚ again‚ help clarify Reger’s poetical prompts. By contrast‚ An Die Hoffnung (after Hölderlin)‚ feelingly sung here by mezzo Catherine Wyn­Rogers‚ recalls the muted world of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody. These are good‚ well­considered performances‚ strongly played and vividly captured by Telarc’s expert engineers. If the programme appeals‚ you can hardly go wrong.