Very much the critics’ darling at the moment, Mariss Jansons took up the post of Chief Conductor of the Bavarian RSO at the start of the 2003-4 season. The contents of these three discs have been admirably captured by the Bavarian Radio production-team from live concerts in Munich between October 2003 and December 2004. Applause remains intact. Collectors will naturally want to know how these new versions of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius symphonies compare with Jansons’s Oslo PO predecessors. Nearly two decades on, the Latvian’s way with the Pathétique has fortunately acquired an extra import, judiciousness and temperament. As ever with Jansons, immaculate preparation goes hand in hand with iron control. His is an admirably tasteful conception, free of histrionics but with an element of calculation that hinders the last ounce of listener involvement: the towering finale, sensitively played though it is, just isn’t terribly moving, while the scherzo doesn’t swagger as it can. In fact, the performance only truly springs to life in the second movement, which has all the silken poise and characteristically Tchaikovskian smiles and tears one could hope to hear. Jansons’s Sibelius 1 starts out with immense promise, the principal clarinet (Eduard Brunner, I presume) distilling exactly the right bardic expectancy, but it’s not long before the playing takes on a pristine, flashy quality (something one could never say of this most discerning of orchestras in the Kubelík era). Nor does Jansons’s interpretation, for all its driving energy and shrewd observation, speak without artifice; the finale in particular seems to bask in a hard-hearted, ‘in your face’ sensationalism that is definitely not for me (the same trait is also present – though to a lesser degree – in Jansons’s earlier EMI recording, 1/92 – nla). Segerstam’s Helsinki PO account is even more arrestingly characterised than either but displays infinitely greater expressive scope and never diverts one’s attention away from the music. The Sibelius shares a disc with Webern’s youthful idyll Im Sommerwind (here both sumptuous and luminous) as well as a trim but not ideally spontaneous Young Person’s Guide. The Pathétique is coupled with Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, through which Jansons steers a clear-sighted yet pleasingly supple course and where his radiant Bavarian strings cover themselves in glory. On a third CD we get the Fifth of Rodion Shchedrin’s six piano concertos to date. Written in 1999 for Olli Mustonen, it’s skilfully couched in a readily assimilable yet never patronising idiom, the predominantly thoughtful cast of its first two movements contrasting vividly with the cumulative fireworks of the toccata-like finale (negotiated with fearless aplomb by Denis Matsuev). It’s preceded by Stravinsky’s 1919 concert suite from The Firebird, where fastidiousness occasionally inclines to fussiness (try the ‘Berceuse’) and the very last ounce of adrenalin is missing. Something of a mixed bag overall, but Jansons and company do hit genuine heights in the Schoenberg. I should add that the extensive notes for the issue containing the Sibelius (SK93538) are in German only.