Among this trio of releases in Günter Hänssler’s edition charting the middle period of Günter Wand’s career, the surprise will be the French disc – a surprise, at least, to those unfamiliar with the superbly buoyant reading of Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies in an earlier volume. Koechlin’s Les Bandar-Log shows Wand to be every bit the equal of his contemporaries Hans Rosbaud and Ernest Bour in elucidating complex modern scores with wit and a keen ear for their tonal palettes. The work emerges as a missing link between Debussy’s Jeux and Boulez’s Rituel: if Koechlin’s Jungle-Book simians are monkeying around with serialism, Wand’s sincere approach to the brilliance of their efforts tips parody into homage.

The Berlioz and Cherubini overtures are thrilling, hard-edged and drily recorded, unlike the Saint-Saëns, which is the dud of the set. The swimmy acoustic does Ruggiero Ricci’s intonation no favours and his bow hand makes heavy weather of music he could generally be relied upon to throw off with élan.

The French disc credits the WDR Symphony Orchestra; based as this is in Cologne, I am at a loss to know whether it is the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra under a different name. Certainly neither ensemble is distinguished by its wind playing (something of an Achilles heel in Wand’s recordings) on these discs.

Wind intonation never quite settles in the Emperor Concerto after a raucous opening tutti, and it doesn’t help that Gilels’s piano isn’t quite in tune with itself or the orchestra, especially in the upper couple of octaves. Still, the performance is an accomplished one. Imperial connotations are cast off in favour of a full and clear sense of the developing dialogue between soloist and orchestra – far beyond anything Mozart had attempted in this direction. So much is made of the Scotch-snap rhythm in the outer movements that one wonders whether Beethoven really did write the work a full year before embarking on his folksong arrangements for George Thomson.

Turn to Gilels and Ludwig on Testament, however, and you get not only fewer finger-slips but much more of a sense of the Concerto in the round – powerful and poetic, what Stephen Plaistow noted in Gilels’s playing as ‘the balance of the decorative and the dramatic understood’. The overture fill-ups lack the proto-authenticist zeal that marks Wand’s Gürzenich Beethoven recordings on Testament but they do not compensate with quite the sure-footed drama of his later NDR recordings.

The best playing is to be found on the Mozart disc, but in the Posthorn Serenade Wand and ‘his’ Hamburg orchestra face stiff competition from their later selves in a recording made in April 2001, less than a year before the conductor’s death. In both, the balancing of the orchestra seems key to the success of what Wand does with the piece, which is to demand attention to its details without trying to overlay it with spurious profundity. Wolfgang Ritter is a graceful flute soloist but cannot counteract Wand’s unusually heavy hand on the tiller: the little D major Serenade is much better, and fairly bounces along. There is, I suspect, much better to come in the remaining volumes.