When Franz Welser-Möst’s contract next comes up for renewal in 2027, he will be the longest-serving music director in the history of The Cleveland Orchestra. For cynics who sniped throughout his LPO tenure in the 1990s, such longevity may serve to confirm the modern dearth of top-drawer maestros to rival the orchestra’s spiritual conscience, George Szell. In post since 2002, his Austrian successor has so far hardly produced a recorded legacy comparable with the 106-CD Columbia/Sony treasury appraised in these pages by Richard Osborne (11/18). Record-label economics and orchestral manoeuvres have altered out of all recognition since Szell’s heyday. Now, breathlessly trailed partnerships with DG having long fizzled out, The Cleveland are belatedly following their top-tier rivals in London, Berlin and Amsterdam, and going it alone.

If such caution speaks of a certain conservatism endemic to the privately funded American orchestral scene, to the old cultural cringe that sees all of its ‘Big Five’ bands still headed by European men, cast your eyes over the contents. There’s nothing standard, let alone safe, about it. Even before considering the performances – which are quite something – every other aspect of the set manifests pride, care and sound instincts on the part of The Cleveland Orchestra’s members and staff, even the often over-ascribed sense of family that brings such ensembles together (and often drives them apart). Articles in the 150-page booklet feature the music, the musicians, their home in Severance Hall, its Skinner organ, and their collective place in the life of the city of Cleveland.

So, the music: as with all upscaled versions of Beethoven quartets, there is a single guiding intelligence at work which is foreign to the material of Op 132 and its dialectic. Counteracting any tendency towards elephantine expansion, however, are the fleet tempos adopted by Welser-Möst, especially in the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’, and the exceptionally agile reflexes of the Cleveland strings, who do everything possible in the Minuet and finale to phrase and answer with the semblance of spontaneity. In generously doubling the bass, the conductor’s own arrangement relies for its effect on hair-trigger engineering as well as playing, while the recitative-introduction to the finale is assigned to the leader alone and taken with some style.

Like the set as a whole, the performance adds up to more than the sum of its parts. What slows down the ear, tunes it into the pace of the musical argument, is the sheer beauty of the playing, like heightened naturalism on a canvas, the ‘refinement and freedom’ of The Cleveland highlighted by RO. There is string sound of comparable sheen and elegance on the LSO’s new Bruckner Sixth with Rattle (LSO Live, 1/20), but the Cleveland musicians enjoy a manifestly superior acoustic. Szell notwithstanding, I fancy that the orchestra has never sounded finer on disc.

Can such beauty work to the advantage of Varèse’s Amériques or Prokofiev’s Third Symphony? Do listen for yourself and you may be surprised, as I was, before reflecting that both works belong to the ‘Harlequin Years’ of ’20s Paris, the world of Ravel and Satie, as much as to the stories of industrial New York and Soviet Russia. Turn back to the first recording of The Fiery Angel – or rather L’ange de feu, the source of Prokofiev’s symphony – and you find a notably similar palette of light and shade in Charles Bruck’s conducting of the Paris Opéra (Accord, 10/03).

For an analytical appreciation of the Third, Welser-Möst’s modern rival is Kirill Karabits (Onyx, 6/14), who gets the mood of the Andante just right – if anything a touch more menacing, a very dirty martini – but the Cleveland recording has the edge, bringing the oboe’s orientalist melody at the heart of the movement a little further forwards and sharpening the focus of those icy violin glissandos: one of many points in the new set when the engineers, musicians and conductor enjoy complete mutual understanding and deserve equal credit. To be clear, Welser-Möst hasn’t declawed the symphony; he has instead pulled back a fraction to show us the whole cat, and a wary, sinuous beast it is too.

We don’t have a record of Strauss conducting his early Aus Italien for reference, but Welser-Möst and his wonderfully responsive Cleveland musicians go straight to the top of the pile alongside Muti in Berlin (Philips, 9/90). Strauss once told Solti ‘not to get too involved in the music – not to lack passion, but to be dispassionate in the execution’. He would surely approve of the Scherzo’s easy sway, waltzing around Rome’s ancient ruins where Muti is a little coarser and more explosively accented, and The Cleveland’s own previous Decca recording under Ashkenazy is hardly more than an enjoyable run-through by comparison. Even the cymbal clash to open the Neapolitan finale makes an astonishingly vivid impact in its own right, anticipating by two years Mahler’s use of an identical gesture to set going the finale of his own symphonic tone-poem, fashioned at length into the First Symphony.

The two new works, by former and current holders of the Cleveland’s composer-in-association post, share a glittering array of textures with Prokofiev and Strauss, also a fairly straightforward direction of travel: around the classical elements in a four-movement organ concerto by Bernd Richard Deutsch, coursing along the not-so-beautiful Danube in Stromab (‘Downstream’) by Johannes Maria Staud. Welser-Möst directs them both with a confidence that says they matter; at least in the case of Staud, I’d agree. Certainly the whole set matters, as a flag planted in shifting sands.