The oddly matter-of-fact opening momentarily disconcerts, but Kees Bakels’s bright-eyed reading of the Fifth Symphony soon settles down. The Bournemouth orchestra responds with commendable application and refinement for its Dutch Chief Guest Conductor, and Naxos’s sound boasts an intrepidly wide dynamic range, though there’s the occasional ill-judged balance and the timbre of the upper strings can verge on the uncomfortably fierce (a feature common to previous instalments in this series). Bakels proves an eminently sane, undisruptive guide, and his interpretation (a less dapper, yet generally more involving affair than the recent Norrington) has many laudable features, not least the nervy anguish he imparts to the first-movement development and central section of the glorious Romanza. On the other hand, I still find Bakels’s scherzo rather brusque and unengaging, while his finale is a little too impatient and inconsequential (the visionary coda disappointingly hangs fire – and I could have done without those crudely projected timpani at the towering return of the work’s opening material). On the whole, though, a pleasing No. 5, if not as organic, moving or symphonically coherent a statement as, say, that of a Boult, Barbirolli or Handley.
In its urgent thrust and at times bracing physicality Bakels’s Ninth most closely resembles Bryden Thomson’s 1990 account. However, for all the agreeable enthusiasm of the orchestral playing, there is more visionary splendour in this extraordinarily imaginative score than Bakels uncovers, and his hasty finale in particular leaves an uncomfortably superficial, even inconsequential impression. Nor is the full, ear-tickling piquancy of VW’s astonishingly bold and individual instrumentation as comprehensively conveyed as it is on rival productions under Slatkin and Handley. Admittedly, there’s a certain touching sincerity about the Bournemouth strings in the wistful secondary material of the Andante sostenuto second movement, but the illimitable mystery of the symphony’s awesome closing bars eludes these performers entirely. A unique, but frustratingly uneven VW pairing overall, worth trying, perhaps, for the sake of Bakels’s likeable Fifth.'