BR-Klassik continues to mine its archive for concerts to release on disc and has dug back to 2013 for this pairing of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Liszt’s Mazeppa with Zubin Mehta conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Mehta’s Tchaikovsky has always been direct and dramatic. He recorded a super symphony cycle (Nos 1‑6) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1970s and a bit of comparative listening here reveals that this new account is just as intense, if a shade slower. The BRSO strings are darker than the LA Phil’s and there’s a plummier clarinet in Munich, too, an essential ingredient in the Fifth Symphony. The only disappointment comes with the famous horn solo in the second movement, which is tentative and doesn’t bloom as richly as one would like.

After a brooding introduction, Mehta does not press forwards quite as determinedly as in LA – the strings don’t surge quite as urgently – yet there’s still an intensity to the playing, a sense of doing battle with Fate. Mehta is flexible with his pacing and there is no sense of him allowing momentum to sag. I like Mehta’s strong sense of direction in the Andante cantabile second movement, where he builds climaxes purposefully. His Waltz has a light lilt, the BRSO woodwinds burbling busily in the skittering middle section. There are times in the finale where Mehta doesn’t quite go hell-for-leather or screw the tension as tightly as he could before the coda, but when that coda arrives, it makes for a satisfying conclusion.

I doubt many people are necessarily going to seek out a Tchaik 5 disc for the coupling, but this Mazeppa is a real rip-snorter, which gallops and seethes wildly and is more than a match for Herbert von Karajan (BPO – DG, 9/61) or Kurt Masur (Leipzig Gewandhaus – Warner, 11/81). Vividly recorded, the Bavarian brass especially boisterous, it makes a terrific coda to the main event.